Merit

The protagonist of Like a House on Fire is Merit, a middle-aged woman from the San Francisco area who decides to go back to work after a long pause in her career dedicated to caring for her two children, Nash and Jude. At the outset of the novel, Merit finds herself nervous about the prospect of returning to the workforce, and has developed a number of insecurities about her abilities as a creator and worker thanks to the demands of motherhood and her failure to get a fledgling painting career off the ground. This causes her to hide behind the security and stability of her marriage to her husband, Cory, and to downplay her abilities in her initial interviews with Jane, the woman who ends up being her new boss at an architectural firm called Jager + Brandt.

Merit's relationship with Jane (and her return to working life) proves...