Review: 'Dwelling' by Emily Hunt Kivel

We all need to live somewhere but, perhaps more importantly, we all want to feel at home somewhere as well. What happens when you find yourself utterly adrift? Could that, somehow, be the push you needed to make yourself a home? Dwelling is a novel all about belonging and finding yourself and manages to be profound while being utterly surreal. Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 05/08/2025
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

Belonging is something that is crucially important to humans, to the extent that Maslow included it in his hierarchy of needs. We need to feel that in some way we are a part of something larger, of something solid, and that there we can be accepted for who we are. When we lose this belonging, or struggle to find it, even if we merely perceive it to be threatened, it can lead to deep unhappiness and depression. I think in our current modern world, we somehow both have countless of new ways to belong and truly struggle with finding genuine belonging. Social media allows us to find others like ourselves, who share our specific interests, likes and dislikes, and this is frequently a good thing. It has also made it more difficult for many, however, to find that connection in real life, in a physical, tactile way. If you add to that the fact that our societies are becoming every more split between different news bubbles and ideologies, that life is becoming more and more expensive, and that the earth is becoming less hospitable due to climate change, and we can find ourselves in something of a belonging crisis. In Dwelling, Emily Hunt Kivel tackles this perennial need for belonging, and all that it entails, in a world that seems to have gone mad. While the novel in form and story becomes delightfully surreal, at its core it remains very human and genuine and thereby manages to provide a beautiful kind of solace to its readers.

Evie has been forced out of her apartment in New York, alongside every other renter in the city. With abandoned furniture and dashed dreams piling up on the sidewalks, she has only one option, which is heading towards Texas and a second cousin, who will hopefully take her in. With her sister, hopefully, safely ensconced at an institution, Evie sets out on her journey. Gulluck, Texas, however, isn't just any town, and Evie quickly finds herself in a surreal place full of odd people, weirder destinies, and the strangest abodes. Is this where a house, and perhaps even a home, can be found? I loved Evie as a protagonist, in part because the narrative voice itself seems to be quite fond of her, while being very aware of her failings as well. When we first meet her, she can just about be said to live. She has a job, she has a place to live, and ... well, that's sort of it. There's nothing wrong with it, but her life is far from magical. The expulsion of all renters is the call to adventure which Evie cannot afford to reject and with a kind of weary bravery, she sets out into the wider world. Kivel manages to take a premise which is not all that far-fetched and turn it into something that becomes utterly enchanting. Every time the narrative takes a surreal turn, I found myself more engaged and more enamoured with Evie and the whole novel. The characters surrounding her, including the town Gulluck itself, are also delightful in their oddity, at once sketches in absurdity and yet somehow truly human.

Dwelling is Emily Hunt Kivel's first novel and it feels incredibly confident for a debut. It is the kind of novel where nothing feels out of place, or rather, where everything, every word and every scene, feels necessary to the whole. In that way it is meticulous. But it is also a novel of wonders, which takes its time for beautiful descriptions and moments of wry insight while maintaining a very solid pace. Kivel also captures a certain kind of yearning which infuses all humans, I think, for something wonderful, something meaningful. One of the main characters alongside Evie, for example, is Bertie, who makes keys. In order to make a key, however, he needs to know about the door, what it looks like, what it's made of, how it makes you feel, what is around it. In Dwelling, it is all about the whole picture, about the whole person, about the small detail as well as the obvious thing, about noticing and seeing what is around you. Due to this, there is a lot of magic to reading Dwelling and to letting Kivel take you on a journey. I was on a journey myself, while reading the novel, and it made me pay closer attention to where I was and who I was with, injecting a gentle sense of wonder back into the ordinary. For those who enjoy surrealist fiction, or realism infused with a solid sense of the fantastical and magical, this is something of a must read. For those who adore fables and fairy tales and wonder whether modern fiction can achieve that same sense of wonder, this is also a very strongly recommended read. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for future books from Emily Hunt Kivel! 

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

Dwelling is one of my favourite books of 2025! I loved how Kivel takes her readers from the very real world to a beautifully fantastic and surreal place that somehow feels more genuine than where we started.