9781971400082_

Four desperate families meet in a foreclosure support group. With their backs against the wall, they agree on a creative but risky plan: to give up on three of the houses and all move into a single dwelling, rescue it from foreclosure, live there for a year, and then sell, hopefully reaping enough from savings and profit that all four families will be able to start afresh.

The four families prove to be a disparate and volatile mix. There's a working-class husband and wife who seem to carry a grudge against everyone and everything in the world. A Mexican American family wonders if they'd fare better returning to their homeland. Two childless seniors, after a long, private lifetime, are rueful about being packed in with strangers. And an upwardly mobile Black couple who carry a shameful secret and a shaky belief they can start over and create a better life.

They say charity begins at home.

In the case of these four families, so does jealousy, lust, greed, and deception.

Praise for House of Sticks

"With dry humour and a clear eye for human weakness, Mark Rogers turns a foreclosure support group into a miniature America: divided by class, race and age, yet bound by the same sinking feeling that the life they were promised has disappeared. House of Sticks is a tense, bruising, sharply observed ensemble novel about people clinging to dignity while the floor gives way beneath them."—Allan Guthrie, Edgar-nominated author of Kiss Her Goodbye

"Open House of Sticks and Mark Rogers instantly yanks you into a world. It's vivid and tangible, and you may not like where you are. You may wish you could escape, but you are in it, baby, hopelessly tangled from the beginning, and there's no way out but to go through it."

—David Cogswell, award-winning author of Existentialism for Beginners

"Mark Rogers has written one hell of a what-if: four families, strangers to one another except for a foreclosure support group, decide to pool their resources and live under a single roof. It is a house full of decent, but damaged people, all fighting their way toward a second chance. The premise is compelling, but it's the characters that lock you in. They feel so authentic and relatable that you root for every small victory, dread every setback, and hope against hope they'll find a way forward together." —Hawk Nygaard-Ostby, Oscar-nominated screenwriter

House of Sticks: A Novel of Foreclosure, Desperation, Best Intentions and Betrayal

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