Michael Denny came home because he had nowhere else to go.

Divorced, out of work, and worn down to nothing, he drives back to the last house on Dover Street and the mother who has been waiting there for twenty years. Ara is overjoyed. She makes up his old room. She cooks the food he loved as a boy. She tells him he never has to leave again, and for a while, in the warm and the quiet, he almost believes her.

But the coffee always tastes faintly of something. The car keys go missing. The phone stops finding a signal. Day by day, in the gentlest possible way, the world outside the house grows smaller, until the only voice left is the one that has always known best. Ara has a gift. She can read a fever, smell a lie, tell a person what they need before they know it themselves. And she has decided, with all the love in her, exactly what her son needs.

A slow, suffocating descent in the tradition of Shirley Jackson, Ara is a novel about the thin line between being cared for and being kept, and about the tender, terrible things done in the name of love.