Carol Prisant

I live in Manhattan with a sort-of embarrassing-but-beloved three-pound dog, and these days, I only write and take Bean to Central Park. But I used to be, in no particular order: a page in a library - back in the days when libraries needed pages - a model, an antiques dealer, an appraiser, and a restorer of old houses. For the past twenty-seven years, I've been the New York editor of of the UK magazine, The World of Interiors. I've also authored four books of non-fiction: Antiques Roadshow Primer (a New York Times best-seller); Antiques Roadshow Collectibles (the companion volume to the above); Good, Better Best (do-it-yourself connoisseurship of antiques); and Dog House (a tender memoir.) Catch 26, my first novel, is about Frannie, an ordinary woman who's been married for so long to a man who doesn't love her that she isn't angry anymore, she's just resigned. Frannie's never had a career, let alone a job, and she grieves every day of her life for the children she hasn't been able to have, but longed for. Then one day, Frannie goes to a new hairdresser, who -seemingly out of nowhere -offers to help her change her life. Not with a wash and a cut, however. With a tempting, unthinkable suggestion that will involve her in a diabolical arrangement. It will leave her profoundly changed, and ultimately, in a struggle for her soul. The story is an old one. It's been told many times, but never as I've done it here: with a female hero and a female villain. It felt like it was time. A footnote: The reader might like to know (or, I might like the reader to know) that all the steamier sections of this book__due to the fact that I met my husband when I was seventeen and we were married for forty-two years__are solely the result of extensive research. Plus a little imagination. Dog House, A Love Story, is an inadvertent memoir. I actually meant to write about my dogs, but my human family kept butting in. So the book is about fur and furnishings and about love: the very-mixed-blessing love I had for my son and my husband, the love we all had for our dogs (though maybe not all the dogs all the time) and the insane kind of love it takes to make a haunted house a home. Throw in a lot of antiques, a couple of triumphs over adversity and more than seems fair of heart-breaking loss, and you have Dog House, a tale of dogs and marriage and life unleashed. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll be glad you don't own a dog. You'll be really glad you do. Carol Prisant is the author of Dog House, Good, Better, Best, the New York Times bestseller Antiques Roadshow Primer, and Antiques Roadshow Collectibles, and now, Catch 26, her first novel. She is also the New York editor of the Conde Nast publication, The World of Interiors, and has written frequently for The New York Times, New York Magazine, and many others. She lives in Manhattan. . .with Bean