Dwelling

A Novel

By: Emily Hunt Kivel

Narrated by: Christine Lakin

A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home—from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again.

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2025 Emily Hunt Kivel (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“A gorgeous novel of real estate, real emotions, and real warmth, with original hardware, original prose, and bursting with natural light. These pages are home to all things audacious and inventive, a dream house for the limits of your imagination—Dwelling is a daring, charming miracle.”—Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story

“At once philosophical, goofy, poetic and so, so smart—I would follow Emily Hunt Kivel anywhere.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

“Festooned with razor-sharp observations and style, Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut is a tale for our precarious moment, treating the melancholy facets of social decay, austerity, and gentrification with dazzling wit and originality. Dwelling announces the arrival of a new voice in literature who is exhilaratingly up to the task.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

A fairy tale for our troubled times

I could not stop listening to this beautifully read story about a young woman finding her place in a most unusual community. In an only slightly exaggerated version of our mindlessly greedy, disconnected society in which the unprivileged are increasingly made to feel worthless, Evie loses her apartment and winds up in the small town of Gullick, Texas. Gullick has albino cicadas, a strange lake with a giant fish, and a mysterious shoemaker's guild... and it just gets better. I loved this magical tale, and so will you.