Harmony House - by Ben Wakeman (Paperback)

About the Book

The house of the future is small. Just big enough for six strangers. Cast to be a spectacle, they choose each other instead. Then they find out they can't leave.

Book Synopsis

The fires come earlier every year, and a frightened country is shopping for a safe place. FutureAbode has just the thing. Houze is the future, and the future is small: five hundred square feet of sustainable perfection. It's survival, virtue, and safety engineered into one beautiful package.

Six strangers win a place inside, cast not for how well they'll get along but for how badly. Different faiths, different politics, different wounds. Friction by design, broadcast around the clock, because friction is what people tune in to watch.

The show wants a fight. What it gets is stranger. Six people, each incentivized to perform a version of themselves, slowly, warily, against their own worst instincts, start doing the one thing no one scripted. They take care of each other. It's the most human thing they could do, and inside this particular experiment, the most dangerous.

Because behind the cameras, behind the brand and its bright sustainable promises, sits a corporate machine with sins it will do anything to keep buried. By the time the six understand what they've really been living inside, the cameras are the least of what they have to survive.

Harmony House begins as a sharp, funny satire about the way we package virtue and sell fear back to the frightened, and becomes something darker and far harder to put down: a story about the contradictions we carry, the selves we perform, and the unlikely family that forms when people refuse to be turned against each other.

Nine Perfect Strangers meets The Goldfinch.

Review Quotes

"A harrowing gut punch of a story: beautiful, deeply human, and haunting." - Kimberly Warner, author of Unfixed

"Darkly funny, unexpectedly tender, and uncomfortably timely." - Chloe Hope, Death & Birds