In one breath

A man who has spent his whole life making strangers feel at home, and has never once let himself be one, comes back to the house that took him in, and learns, slowly, how to be seen.

The novel

Elias has always been good at rooms. As a boy at a supper table on a Georgia road he learned to read every face and show none of his own, to slide the salt across the oilcloth before the hand had found it. A teacher graded his calm a five out of ten. A year on the North Sea taught him that love can cross an ocean. For a decade he kept counters in twenty-two towns, loved in every one, a bottle the only town he carried.

The twenty-third town asks for him by name, and he lies at its door about the drinking. A year sober in the flat country ends with a letter, and the door opens again. “You eat yet?” says August, the owner. “Kitchen's a mess. Scones are decent.” Elias becomes the keeper of the mornings: two cups on the tray, one for himself and one just to the right for whoever comes in from the cold. At that counter he writes a novel, and learns, one true sentence at a time, what it is to be welcomed back.

It is a quiet book. The owner who shelters Elias and bends him is drawn whole, with no villain in him. The men Elias loves along the way are held the way the book holds everything, without making a subject of them. The recovery in it goes exactly as far as the truth does, and no further.

On the shelf beside

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan

A decent man doing ordinary work in a small town, whose attention to other people is the whole moral drama, told with restraint.

Plainsong

Kent Haruf

Colorado, plain sentences, and people who make a household for someone who has nowhere to be.

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout

A difficult person rendered whole: no villain, no verdict, the hard thing seen from the far side.

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

A man in service whose perfection is how he avoids his own life; here, a keeper who gets to hear it while he can still answer.

A page

From the novel

The Door

It was spring in the high country, which is to say it was still mostly winter with its coat unbuttoned. The snow along Main Street had shrunk back into gray ridges at the curbs, and the meltwater ran in the gutters with a sound like a creek that had wandered uphill and lost its way. Elias carried the duffel on his shoulder. It was not heavy. He had learned a long time ago how to fit a life into something you could carry up a street on foot, and he had never once, until that morning, wished it weighed more.

The Inn stood where it had always stood, Mount Royal behind it with the early light just touching its shoulder. Smoke from the chimney. A wreath somebody had forgotten to take down, gone brown at the edges. The porch steps had been shoveled and salted, and he stood at the bottom of them for the length of one breath, then another, and then he went up.

The bell over the door made its clean bright interval. The same interval. Bells do not know anything.

The lobby smelled the way it had smelled in every dream he had declined to remember in the mornings: cedar from the hearth, brown sugar, and under them both, very faint, the ghost of lavender drifting down from the linens upstairs. The fire was already lit. Somebody had been up before him. Somebody had always been up before him, here.

August came out of the office.

He stopped in the doorway, and the two men looked at each other across the lobby for a moment that had the whole letter inside it. Neither of them had rehearsed anything, or both of them had, privately, for months, and none of it was any use now.

“You eat yet?” August said.

“No.”

“Kitchen's a mess. Scones are decent.”

And he turned back toward the office, and that was the ceremony.

Elias stood a moment longer with the duffel on his shoulder. Then he set it down beside the desk, and hung his coat on the third hook by the door, and went into the kitchen, where there was in fact a mess, and found an apron on its nail, and tied it, and started the coffee.

The book, in full, on request

Where it stands

The book: Literary fiction, complete at 81,000 words. Close third person on Elias, past tense: from a supper table in Georgia to the front desk of a house under a Colorado mountain.
Rights: Unpublished. World rights available, and clean.
The first novel: Still, by Design., published by Galena House in hardcover. Elias is its protagonist too; Good Little Innkeeper stands on its own, and a reader needs nothing from the first.
The author: Avery Lane Maxwell writes in the mountains of Colorado, where he has kept rooms for strangers for most of a decade, and is the founder of Galena House, a small literary house. Avery Lane Maxwell is a pen name, presented as one.
Publicity: Courtney DeWinter, DeWinter Marketing & PR, Denver.

For agents and editors

The query, a one-page synopsis with the ending, the first fifty pages and the full manuscript are ready. Write, and I will send whatever you would like to read.

avery@averylanemaxwell.com

The first novel Galena House Audio The press room