Daniel Mason's novel follows a single house in western Massachusetts through four centuries of inhabitants, from seventeenth-century Puritan lovers to the present day. Each section introduces new characters who inhabit the same physical space: an English soldier, spinster twins, an apple farmer, a crime reporter investigating mass graves, and more. The land itself is a character, the yellow house a constant presence through which history flows. Mason, a psychiatrist and novelist, writes with careful attention to how each era's inhabitants understood their world. The Puritans' religious intensity, the Victorian obsession with taxonomy, twentieth-century dislocations—each period is rendered in prose that matches its sensibility. The novel is also haunted by an elusive painter whose work appears and reappears through the centuries. Mason weaves together stories that could each stand alone but gain resonance from their accumulation, revealing patterns invisible from within any single life. The book asks what we owe to those who lived before us and those who will come after, and what it means to belong to a place. It's a formally ambitious work that remains emotionally accessible, a meditation on time and mortality disguised as a page-turner.