Inside the House Inside

by Rosalind Goldsmith

$20.95

• • April 2025
  • print ISBN: 978-1-55380-726-1
  • ebook ISBN: 978-1-55380-727-8
  • 5″ x 8″ Trade paper, 170 pages
  • Fiction

Excluded from society, the characters in these short short stories are outcasts, cut off from each other, from their future, from their own lives or from sanity and meaning.

In Rosalind Goldsmith’s remarkable debut collection, cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion, captures lives lived in the margins.

“This book vibrates with the intensity of distilled experience on every level – phrase, sentence, story, collection. The stories are bite-size wonders. They explode once ingested, like swallowing whole worlds. The motivating core of them is love and compassion, but not those two alone. Love. Compassion. And warning. – Anne Fleming, author of Giller-nominated Curiosities

“Inside the House Inside inhabits a space somewhere between our dreams and our nightmares. Moving deftly between realism and something much stranger, these stories are uncanny and moving at once. They excavate the basement and the attic in language at once direct and lyrical, and their brevity haunts.” – Kate Cayley, award-winning author of Lent and How you Were Born

Homelessness, climate change, depression, anxiety, disease, or the trauma of abuse has pushed her characters beyond their limits. They survive outside the norm, living within the structures they have built within their own minds. We meet a drug-addicted woman living on the street, a boy on the run from his father; a young woman obsessed with a text message, an old woman trying to reassemble a language and a world that have both fallen apart, a woman pursued by her own life and another dancing to save hers.

In concise, unflinching prose, each story is linked by visceral imagery of the contemporary world, an intense, heartbreaking world, where lives are lost to exclusion. These stories offer the raw vibrancy of clarity based on understanding and empathy.