"Rich, complex and emotionally full...A pleasantly surreal and captivating experience." — Andy Perham, fellow writer



"Great stories that constantly float over a deep and disturbing reality, until it finally capsizes and drowns everyone in murky despair." — Greg Wlasiuk, fellow writer





With This is the House My Mother Built, future best-selling author Mitzi Akaha unveils her "oh-so sad" short stories to the public for the very first time. Full of humor and tenderness, her debut collec-tion explores the trials and tribulations of childhood, and her stories have been praised for "capturing the extreme inno-cence and extreme cruelty in children" (Geoff Mak, fellow writer). Her narratives span the bleakest years of adolescence while maintaining "a wonderful sense of what's interesting and fascinating about characters" (Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers). The personalities found in these five stories could easily be mistaken for real people—sympathetic, oftentimes irra-tional, and very human in their imperfec-tion. But from the adolescent boy's bed-room to the trailer park, it's all fiction, down to the color of the sky, dramatic twists on perceivable realities, exercising what Lucy Corin (Everyday Psychokillers and The Entire Predicament) calls "an extra-ordinary confidence in storytelling."



Put simply, perhaps Koji Frahm, fellow future best-selling author, said it best:



"She's cute, like her stories."