Enter into the life and mind of a shy teenager coming of age in the early 2000s in a pretty, suburban neighbourhood where nothing is quite as it seems—including her. At a glance, she’s a student with a boyfriend and a job at the coffee shop. Yet she’s skipping class, grappling with intense feelings for girls and growing dangerously dependent on illicit pills with cute names.

Wanting nothing more than to be who she is on the inside, Erin Steele's spiral into addiction and parallel quest for meaning takes readers into big houses with spare room for secrets; past quiet cul-de-sacs where kids party in wooded outskirts zoned for development; where West Coast rains can pummel for days.

Written with searing honesty that stares at you until you turn away, then stares at you some more, Sunrise over Half-Built Houses digs down past pleasantries and manicured lawns, through the sucking hole of addiction, then further still to reveal a place where we can all see ourselves and each other more clearly.

Erin Steele is a writer, low-key philosopher and insatiably curious explorer of life. She writes On Being Human on Substack, is a 2022 Writing by Writers fellow and has been published in Human Parts by Medium. She currently lives in Kelowna, BC, Canada where she practises all limbs of yoga, runs long distances on trails and nerds out on nature—particularly when the arrowleaf balsamroot explodes the hills yellow.

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"This is a beautiful book, drenched in the senses, giving life to the idea that interiority is best captured through an exacting attention to the outside world. I read this work with full engagement at every turn, in awe of its dreamlike textures, swept by its immersion in both description and sound. I knew from the very first page that I was in the hands of a brilliant, singular writer. Sunrise over Half-Built Houses reads like a big piece of music and it remakes the imagination like an ongoing song."

—Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

“Sunrise over Half-Built Houses is a piercing blade of a book—agony on one side, glinting light on the other. Erin Steele has written an unputdownable memoir that is more than a visceral journey through addiction in all its disguises: it’s a love song to language, yearning, and hope.”

—Shelley Wood, author of The Leap Year Gene