Town House: A Novel

Jack Madigan should be leading an enviable life. He’s the sole heir of a ’70s rock icon. He lives with his retro-obsessed teenage son, Harlan, in a once-magnificent Boston town house. But now 36, Jack’s painting career is buckling under a raging case of agoraphobia. And when the foreclosure notice arrives, Jack must face losing the only home he’s ever known—and his only safe zone. When Jack’s ex-wife announces that Harlan would be better off living with her and her vitamin-enriched fiancé, Jack has to figure out how to deter the perky, inexperienced real-estate agent, hold on to his house, keep his son at home, and—through the tenacity of the little girl next door—finally step out onto the sidewalk.

Fox 2000 swooped in to pre-empt the film rights while Town House was still on submission to publishers. Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions is set to produce the movie and Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter Doug Wright (Memoirs of a Geisha) is adapting the screenplay. A book with the ability to both entertain and move us, Town House is a smart, acerbic novel bursting with heart and quirky charm.

“Its official title is Town House, but in Hollywood they’re already calling Tish Cohen’s novel About a Girl.” - The Globe and Mail

“TOWN HOUSE is a poignant, acerbic and charming novel with real heart. Make room on your bookshelf for Tish Cohen.” - Barbara Delinsky, New York Times bestselling author of A WOMAN BETRAYED

“For someone who can’t leave the house, Jack Madigan is a heck of a guy. Town House is everything you could ask for in a novel: touching, wry, bewitching, eccentric, and riveting to the end. I love this book and eagerly await Tish Cohen’s next.” - Sara Gruen, New York Times bestselling author of Water for Elephants

“A constellation of characters whose idiosyncrasies make the family of Little Miss Sunshine look like Ozzie and Harriet.” - Kirkus Reviews

“In her first novel, Tish Cohen has written an original portrait of a pathetic man that is at times sardonically comic and humanly poignant. Never straying into sentimentality or veering off course into ludicrousness, Cohen’s Jack Madigan is a three-dimensional, albeit anomalous, lost soul of our modern, twisted, fractured, society.” - Rex Pickett, New York Times bestselling author of Sideways

“...sardonically comic and humanly poignant.” - Rex Pickett, New York Times bestselling author of SIDEWAYS

“A dead rock star who still haunts the place; his agoraphobic son who must not only leave his father’s house but sell it; the real estate agent who couldn’t sell Shangri-La; and the neighbor child who visits through a hole in wall and thinks she’s a dog. You’d have to look awfully hard to find a novel with a bigger cast of memorable characters than Tish Cohen manages to squeeze into one Boston Town House.” - Philip Beard, author of Dear Zoe and Lost in the Garden