THE QUIET HOUSE ON CATHARINE STREET - Jeffrey Rittenhouse

Some houses keep what they love.

When Steve Moyer takes the spare room in Roberta Putnum's South Philadelphia row house for the four months of his chemotherapy, he is looking for a quiet place to recover. What he finds, in the basement of her two-hundred-year-old house, is a chamber no one was meant to find: an altar from 1778, vestments folded by a priest long dead, and a small silver reliquary holding a sliver of dark wood that, when Steve touches it, returns him whole.

The miracle is theirs only as long as no one knows. But a polite woman appears at the door asking about renovations. A black sedan idles at the corner of Catharine and Eighth. A retired priest dies of a too-convenient heart attack. Roberta and Steve have a season to figure out what their second life is for, and what they are willing to spend it on, before the people who collect such things come to take it back.

Set against the brick and twilight of Bella Vista, The Quiet House on Catharine Street is a novel about love built late, the small mercies of an old neighborhood, and the only honest way to keep a second life: by spending it on what you love.