STILL HERE

A NOVEL  ·  COMING 2027

What does it mean to belong somewhere
you did not choose — and what does it mean
when a place chooses you?

I have moved a great deal in my life. I have been welcomed into places, and I have left them. I have learned the lightness of transience, and I have, if I am honest with you, made that lightness into something I was quietly proud of. Portable. Unencumbered. Free.

And then I began to ask myself what that freedom actually was, and who it was available to.

That question would not let me go.

There are people — more of them now than at any point in recorded history — for whom the question of belonging is not philosophical. For whom home is not a choice but a calculation, a risk, a waiting room.

Who are not choosing the next place but waiting for a system to decide whether they are permitted to be somewhere at all.

People for whom the distance between I could live here and I have nowhere else is not a mood or a metaphor.

It is the entire shape of a life.

That gap is what this novel is about. Not to resolve it — I don't think it can be resolved — but to ask what it costs a person to hold it honestly.

What changes when we can no longer look away?

The answer, it turned out, was a novel set on Portugal's Atlantic coast. A whitewashed villa above limestone cliffs. A woman who has spent her career interpreting other people's legacies and must decide whether she is willing to become part of one. A sanctuary network older than the building that houses it, still running, still making demands.

And a seven-year-old girl who has claimed a lighthouse as her own.

I have been living inside this book for more than a year. I have loved the people in it — their precision, their stubbornness, their small acts of care, the way they keep showing up for one another even when showing up is complicated and legally uncertain and costs something real.

Still Here is coming in 2027. I cannot wait for it to reach you.

"What changes in a person when they can no longer look away."

ABOUT THE NOVEL

Harriet Blackwood has spent twenty years interpreting other people's histories — forty-seven sites, twelve countries, always moving. When she inherits a Portuguese coastal villa from a woman she met only once, she expects an archive to catalogue and a building to assess.

What she finds is a sanctuary network older than the house itself, still running, still making demands. And a seven-year-old girl who has claimed the lighthouse as her own.

Still Here is a novel about chosen belonging, moral responsibility, and what it means to finally stop leaving.

If you'd like to know when Still Here is available — and hear a little of the story behind it as publication approaches — I'd love to keep in touch.

Still Here is Ellen Barone's first novel. Her memoir, I Could Live Here, is available now.