One day, Angie Voorsterdiligent student, all-star swimmer and ivy-league bound high school seniordives to the bottom of a pool and stays there. In that moment, everything the Voorster family believes they know about each other changes. Katharine Noel’s extraordinary debut illuminates the fault lines in one family’s relationships, as well as the complex emotional ties that bind them together. With grace and precision rarely seen in a first novel, Noel guides her reader through a world where love is imperfect, and where longing for an imagined ideal can both destroy one family’s happiness and offer them redemption. Halfway House introduces a powerful, eloquent new literary voice. "In Katharine Noel's stunning debut novel, family life is revealed--laid open--in all its love and warmth and, yes, its darkness, too. Each character lives on the page, and together they teach us the best lessons of fiction: how we live, and how we live through crisis. I was enthralled."