RENTAL HOUSE

From the award-winning author of CHEMISTRY comes a sharp-witted, insightful novel about a marriage as seen through the lens of two family vacations.

Keru and Nate first meet in college. Misfits in their own families, they find in each other a feeling of home. Keru is the only child of strict, well-educated Chinese immigrant parents who hold her to impossible standards even as an adult. Nate is from a rural, white, working class family that has never trusted his intellectual ambitions or -now- the citizenship status of his "foreign" wife. Some years into their marriage, Keru and Nate find themselves incorporating their families into two carefully planned vacations. The results are disastrous and revealing. First in a cozy beach house on Cape Cod, and later in a luxury bungalow in the Catskills, the couple is forced to confront the hidden truths at the core of their relationship. How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) are needed to make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what does it take to shepherd everyone back together? Told in wry, gimlet-eyed prose, RENTAL HOUSE is a concentrated gem of a novel about the seen and unforeseen forces like in-laws, careers, dreams, and fears, that shake up a marriage over time. Weike Wang is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry and her doctorate in public health. She received her MFA from Boston University. Her debut novel, CHEMISTRY, won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, a 2018 Whiting Award, as well as the John C. Zacharis Award. Weike was named a "5 Under 35" honoree of the National Book Foundation and her short story, "Omakase" first appeared in The New Yorker and was published in the 2019 Best American Short Stories. Her fiction has been published in literary magazines, including The New Yorker, Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Barnard College.