Sun House

Narrated by the "Holy Goat," later revealed to be Grady Haynes, the novel chronicles how a diverse group of spiritually wounded people converge over several decades to form a community called the Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company on four thousand acres in Montana's Elkmoon Valley. Structured as a series of "Tellings" spanning roughly 1958 to 2016, the book weaves together origin stories of approximately a dozen characters before tracing their convergence into a collective life of contemplative practice and mutual love.

Jamey Van Zandt is born on January 30, 1958, in Portland, Oregon. His mother, Debbie, dies of leukemia on his fifth birthday in the same hospital where he was born, creating what the novel calls a "gravitationally collapsed interior mother object," a psychic wound that destabilizes him every January 30th for decades. At ten, he discovers that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on the same date, deepening his conviction that Fate has singled him out. As a teenager, his birthday rage drives him to suicidal acts of defiance, including riding his bicycle blind into traffic, shattering bones and maiming himself. The strangers who keep risking their lives to save his begin a slow healing in him.

Risa McKeig grows up in Seattle, caught between her father Dave McKeig's love of Delta blues and her increasingly alcoholic mother Moira O'Reilly's choral world. Dave abandons Risa to Moira's care when Risa is eight, hardening a wound she carries for years. At the University of Washington, Risa falls in love with Sanskrit, fusing the English word "sad" with the Sanskrit syllable ṣad, meaning "to sit down inwardly and attain the True," to create a practice she calls "ṣadness" that converts sorrow into inner stillness. A crisis strikes when she finds the "Sons Only Verse" in the Upaniṣads, a foundational Hindu scripture, declaring that the highest mysteries must never be revealed to anyone who is not a Brahmin's son. Devastated, she quits Sanskrit formally but continues reciting fragments from memory. She also befriends TJ McGraff, an ex-Jesuit novice who becomes her "mother-brother," forming one of the novel's most enduring bonds.

TJ and his fraternal twin, Jervis McGraff, are orphaned at sixteen when their parents die in a car crash. Jervis, inspired by Saints Francis and Clare and the medieval Beguines, a movement of self-sufficient laywomen mystics destroyed by the Inquisition, gives away most of his inheritance and lives in voluntary poverty. TJ's wealth grows through investments guided by Jervis's intuition. During TJ's Jesuit regency in Mexico, the father of a girl killed by a bolt fallen from a jet gives TJ the child's tiny trouble dolls, including a figure he names Tiny Joseph. This gift transforms TJ's understanding of priesthood and causes him to leave the Jesuits. In 1989, Jervis intervenes when he discovers two men beating a meth dealer behind a dumpster; the attackers beat Jervis into a coma. After seven weeks he wakes speaking of "Ocean," a boundless consciousness he inhabits for the rest of his life, walking Portland's streets guided by flashes of imagery he calls "strobes." Together, TJ and Jervis establish Dumpster Catholicism, a faith rooted in recovering the Church's discarded truths and peoples.

In Colorado, folk singer Lorilee Shay marries free-climber Trey Jantz after they bond over the Gary Snyder line "The mountains are your mind." Their marriage deteriorates under financial pressure and Trey's infidelities. Lorilee divorces him, renames their son Mu after the Zen concept of "no-thing," and undergoes a creative awakening on a solo campout where the mountain pours songs through her in a single night.

Grady Haynes, Risa's former boyfriend from graduate school, becomes obsessed with Montana's Elkmoon Mountains after Dave describes them. Over multiple summers he encounters Gladys Wax, an enigmatic horse packer who introduces him to the Lûmi, secretive mountain pilgrims who traverse a high-elevation purification route through the range's highest peaks.

Dave, dying of pancreatic cancer, reconnects with Risa after secretly studying her abandoned Sanskrit library for three years. Risa drives his ashes to Montana and scatters them in the Glory Meadow, where she is charged on horseback by Lou Roy Skinner, an aging cowboy guarding the land. A vast Presence floods Risa, Lou Roy's horse refuses to attack, and the encounter seeds friendships central to the future community. Ranch foreman Kale Broussard, whose family once owned the land now controlled by NorBanCo, an international banking conglomerate planning a luxury development, offers Risa use of a century-old schoolhouse. TJ visits, falls in love with the valley, and begins investing locally. Lorilee performs at a local cafe, and Risa, watching from the audience, recognizes a spiritual sister.

Jamey and Risa first meet at TJ's restaurant in Portland, where Jamey sneaks in with his beloved border collie, Romeo, hidden in a custom carrier. Their connection is immediate, but circumstances part them. They reunite on January 30, 1998, when Risa tells the story of Gandhi's last words as her father related it on his deathbed. Jamey, who has been doing "heartwork" assigned by Jervis to reconnect with his dead mother, breaks down. They recognize each other as destined partners. Risa, already pregnant via artificial insemination, tells Jamey, who responds with joy.

NorBanCo's development fails due to pine beetle infestation, legal challenges, and corporate denial of climate change. During the catastrophic 2003 wildfire season, the Elkmooners fight fires across the land they hope to acquire while NorBanCo's agent Tex Schiller commits arson by burning the Grand Lodge under corporate orders. During the same fires, Grady discovers Lorilee swimming in Jade Lake, a warm, meteorite-created body of water at the foot of the Blue Mosque, a prominent mountain formation. A thunderstorm injures Lorilee, and Grady carries her thirty miles down the mountain over seven days. She whispers the "Queendom-Come Shards" into his ear: fragments of revelation about Earth/Sophia, the divine feminine whose creative power ensures life will renew itself.

After NorBanCo collapses, the Elkmooners pool resources. Risa contributes her father's life insurance; Ona Kutar, a rock star who had been Nashville's Iona Dupree before reinventing herself, matches the sum; and TJ covers the remainder. They acquire four thousand acres. Lorilee's breast cancer casts a shadow over the community's early years. Rosalia Dominguez, a young woman driven by grief over her mother's captivity by drug dealers, processes her loss through Ocean-walks with Jervis and becomes the community's first "Dumpster Catholic Beguine." Weekly predawn "Monday Listenings" in the unfinished B Barn become a shared contemplative practice. Jamey and Risa's life together produces two children: Fionn and Willa.

Lorilee's cancer returns and worsens. She performs a final concert singing "Breast Song," honoring the spiritual meaning of her lost breasts and her kinship with medieval female mystics. In the novel's climax, Lorilee lies dying in Sky Door, a cottage built specifically for departing this life, while Risa maintains a five-day vigil. Seventy friends gather in the nearby barn, where a calliope hummingbird flies in and becomes trapped against a stained-glass window. The bird becomes a living metaphor: The barn is Lore's failing body, the bird her spirit, the glowing window the passage she must make. TJ holds up Tiny Joseph and begins to hum; Lily Cloud Raines, a five-year-old child of the community, joins him; and a seventy-voice choir swells into an enormous sound that pours through the open window of Sky Door. Trey, Lore's ex-husband who has spent years doing penance as a volunteer laborer, climbs a ladder to free the bird. Rosalia carries it to Sky Door's window, breathes Lore's name over it, and releases it. Inside, Lore whispers her last word, "Blue," evoking Blue Empty, the meditation spot where she found her deepest peace. Risa, lying beside her, feels life erupt through Lore's body and depart. The novel closes with Grady surveying the community on a summer solstice evening, watching the residents tend horses, haul manure, and make music as their "second skins" range across the land and creatures they share.