The Architect - Michael Jonathan Hyde

The Architect

Marcus Hale has spent twenty-three years trying to be the architect he always believed he could be. He has never quite managed it. Then one night, exhausted and out of ideas, he falls asleep at his drafting table - and wakes to find a complete set of extraordinary plans that he did not draw.

He takes them. He presents them as his own. And for a while, everything he ever wanted falls into place.

But the plans came with a note.

This comes with a price.

What follows is a quietly devastating story about talent and longing, about the lies we tell the people who love us most, and about a dead architect who loved his wife so completely that he reached back from wherever the dead go and found a way to build her the house he always promised.

Set against the backdrop of a single remarkable house - its butterfly roof, its creek-facing windows, its small room that nobody ordered built - The Architect is a story about what we owe each other, what we owe ourselves, and the strange, crooked, entirely human ways that gifts find their way into the world.

Some debts cannot be avoided. They can only be paid.

Michael Jonathan Hyde is a retired businessman, traveler, and storyteller from Salt Lake City, Utah. The Architect is his second book.