HOUSE OF REFUGE

Nate House's evocative House of Refuge chronicles three timelines on the same Florida land: a shipwrecked woman taken in by Ais Indians in 1694, a pioneer family escaping Michigan's cold in 1885, and an old man whose family has guarded this sacred land for three generations.

Eighty-three-year-old Abraham Corson Jr. has spent his life hearing ghostly cries of women, chains, and horses echoing across the water each night. Now he has eleven days to sell his property to a condo developer. But when a mysterious young woman appears beneath the ancient Live Oak, the boundaries between past and present begin to blur, and the haunting sounds grow more urgent—as if the land itself is awakening to fight back.

Through intimate journal entries and vivid natural imagery, House captures the true cost of American expansion. In an America where all wild spaces face the developer's bulldozer, House of Refuge asks whether some places are too sacred to surrender—and what forces might rise to defend them.