From the novel
"Evening came like forgiveness, slow, amber, and patient."
Chapter Eleven · The Evening After
A Novel · The Atmosphere
Some places heal you by watching you live.
Still, by Design.
"Healing isn't found in grand gestures, but in the stillness between them."
At a fifteen-room inn at the foot of a Colorado mountain, a man who mistook motion for purpose keeps time with a building that has outlived everyone who built it. Mornings begin the same way, the kettle, two cups set out without thinking, the gold light crossing the floor one plank at a time.
When the inn's keeper asks him to stay, not as help, but as something closer to family, he must decide whether he is ready to belong to a place, and to the people who keep arriving at its door.
Still, by Design. is the first room in a larger house; its companion, Good Little Innkeeper, tells how Elias came to it. A novel about recovery, belonging, and the slow architecture of a life rebuilt.
A house that seems to breathe alongside him.
"Evening came like forgiveness, slow, amber, and patient."
Chapter Eleven · The Evening After
Twenty-one seconds, shot at the lake below the inn.
The novel unabridged, in the author's own voice: the kettle, the front desk, the gold light crossing the floor one plank at a time. The first chapter is free to listen to, and there is nothing to sign.
7 hrs 8 mins · Unabridged · Galena House Publishing
Signed copies of Still, by Design. are available through Galena House, each hand-signed by Avery, shipped from Frisco, Colorado. There are two hardcovers now: the jacketed edition, the lake at dusk wrapped around cream boards, and the blue cloth edition, navy linen with gold on the spine; both are printed to order and ship from the press. Or find it on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, ebook and audiobook. Any bookstore can order the jacketed hardcover by its number, 979-8-9937250-3-1, or the trade paperback, 979-8-9937250-5-5, and both are on Bookshop.org, where an order helps a local shop.
The way something is built is the way it is felt.
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