The Butter House

This is a limited edition hardcover. Sarah Gerard's The Butter House follows a woman who moves from a New York apartment to a Florida bungalow with her boyfriend. As she adapts to her new surroundings, the narrator navigates contradictory landscapes of love and possession, nature and built-environment, empathy and sympathy. She undergoes the arduous task of introducing two cats to the house and each other, while also becoming a surrogate caretaker for the neighborhood's feral cat colony. She grows a garden. She interrogates what it means to care for someone or something. Laced within these tender scenes, The Butter House chooses deliberate moments to scratch and bite with the ferocity of a territorial alley cat.



Genre: Literary Fiction

"A couple moves into the titular Butter House, and soon find themselves mired in the project of cat care. Sarah Gerard writes beautifully and precisely about the visceral, secretive feline landscape, and the possibilities that emerge when this world intersects with the human realm--challenging the couple at the center of The Butter House to renegotiate their relationship to care and what it means to feel at home." - Laura van den Berg

"The Butter House is like a lithe and seductive feline, sinking its uncut claws into you. Sarah Gerard's prose is quiet and contemplative and then chaotic in bursts, also not unlike a cat. The Butter House incisively considers the simultaneous care and cruelty of pet ownership, and Gerard is masterful in writing into all the nooks and crannies of a relationship. It's the tale cat people deserve." - Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya