Did Black Friday leave you black and blue from fighting for the last gadget du jour at your local Big Box? Are you tempted to punch out the bell-ringer outside your supermarket? Maybe you need a heaping dose of Christmas spirit delivered in book form.

For a writer, capturing that...

I'm house obsessed, a house voyeur. Always have been. As soon as I started reading I found myself drawn to fictional character's homes as much as I was to the characters themselves. In "The Fixer Upper," the title character in the book is a mouldering Victorian mansion called Birdsong. For...