This image is the cover for the book Halfway House

Halfway House

“A teenager’s psychotic break unhinges her family in this sure-footed first novel.” —The New York Times Book Review

A New York Times Editors’ Choice
Winner of the Kate Chopin Writing Award
Winner of the Ken/NAMI Award

One day, Angie Voorster—diligent student, all-star swimmer, and ivy-league bound high school senior—dives to the bottom of a pool and stays there. In that moment, everything the Voorster family believes they know about each other changes.

Katharine Noel’s extraordinary debut illuminates the fault lines in one family’s relationships, as well as the complex emotional ties that bind them together.

With grace and precision rarely seen in a first novel, Noel guides her reader through a world where love is imperfect, and where longing for an imagined ideal can both destroy one family’s happiness and offer them redemption. Halfway House introduces a powerful, eloquent new literary voice.

“An eloquent literary performance . . . [A] memorable first novel with a uniquely powerful grace.” —The Boston Globe

Katharine Noel

Katharine Noel is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she formerly held a Stegner Fellowship. Her writing has won grants from the Henfield-Transatlantic, Barbara Deming, and Rona Jaffe foundations, among others, and was included in Best New American Voices 2003. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she is at work on her second novel.

Grove Press