Some places let you pass through.
Some places ask you to stay.
STILL HERE
A NOVEL · COMING 2027
Dr. Harriet Blackwood has spent twenty years interpreting other people's histories — forty-seven sites, twelve countries, always moving on to the next project. 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 instead is a sanctuary network older than the house itself, still running, still making demands — demands she has no legal standing to meet and cannot walk away from.
And a seven-year-old girl who has claimed a lighthouse as her own.
Still Here is a novel about chosen belonging, obligation, and what it costs to stay.
PERSONAL NOTE
For fifteen years, I have lived as a long-stay traveler. I have been welcomed into places, and I have left them. I have learned the lightness of transience and built a life around that freedom.
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.
Living as I have — welcomed and temporary, on visas with expiry dates, watching the clock in a way that has been inconvenient rather than existential — I have understood something, in a minor key, about what it is to be somewhere conditionally. To know your presence requires permission. That the thing you have built around yourself could be interrupted by a system you didn't design.
I have known people for whom that question has never been abstract. For whom borders are not shifting — they have always been walls.
Perhaps this weighs on you too. There are more people now than at any point in recorded history for whom home is not a choice. Who are waiting — for a hearing, a letter, a system's decision — to learn whether they are permitted to be somewhere at all.
This novel is my attempt to sit with that. Not to resolve it — I don't think it can be resolved — but to ask what it costs to hold it honestly.
For me, that question took the shape of a story: one woman, one coast, and what it costs to stay.
I have lived inside this question for years, and the book itself for the last fourteen months. 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.
I hope this story finds you. I hope it stays with you.
Still Here is coming in 2027.
Still Here is Ellen Barone's first novel. Her memoir, I Could Live Here, is available now.
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.