Restoration

Join us for an evening with author Carol Davis, celebrating the release of her debut novel, Restoration, in conversation with Amanda Uhle, author of the memoir Destroy This House.

Restoration follows American architect Risa Meier from San Francisco to rural England, in 1984, to restore a crumbling centuries-old barn on a remote family estate. Fresh from a devastating loss and eager for distance from her life back home, she throws herself into the project, but the work quickly becomes something more complicated. As she begins uncovering the building’s layered history, letters from the past begin to surface, revealing a family history she never fully understood. The deeper she goes into the restoration, the more the project begins to mirror her own reckoning with grief, inheritance, and identity. Set against the quiet beauty of the English countryside, Restoration illustrates the ways the past lives inside the structures we inherit—both the physical ones we restore and the emotional ones we carry with us.

Together Amanda and Carol will consider how houses serve as emotional landscapes. The titles of each book seem like opposites: Destruction versus Restoration. But each examine families’ deepest complexities—despair and longing and love—and how they unfold inside the framework of the structures that house us. Both books are interested in how structures hold memories. One story asks what would happen if we tore the house down? The other asks what if we listened to the stories the house remembers? Would our stories be the same if they took place inside different walls? When we unravel the stories we inherit, do we attain a deeper truth or just a different one, informed by the intervening years? 

Carol Davis has worked as a researcher, archivist, teacher and writer in close collaboration with architects and art conservators in New York City, Los Angeles, and London. She holds a BA in art and architectural history and an MFA in writing and literature. Restoration is her first novel.

Amanda Uhle is the publisher & executive director of McSweeney's. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, Oprah Daily and beyond. Her memoir Destroy This House was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and is an Elle magazine best book of 2025.