America the Abandoned: Captivating Portraits of Deserted Homes

Photographer and debut author Sansivero takes readers on a resonant tour of vacated homes across the U.S. through a series of evocative images. Photographs like “The Famous Writer’s Library”—which depicts an unnamed Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s Virginia house brimming with toppling stacks of books and personal effects—feel so characteristic of their former inhabitants that it seems they may have just left. Even long-neglected spaces clearly suggest the shape of the lives they once contained, like the dilapidated, paint-flaking interior of “Home Sweet Home,” with its fireplace, mantelpiece, and a yellow blanket draped across an armchair calling to mind a bustling family home. Other photos, including one of a stopped clock in an abandoned Virginia home, raise more questions than they answer (“When did the clock last tell time? Was it long after people were living there, or had it stopped before they left?”). Providing a few sentences beneath each photo, Sansivero frames each space as a time capsule of a person’s past, simultaneously recognizing life’s ephemerality and reminding readers to cherish the “little things we hold so dear, and that they will come and go, like those of others before us.” Alternately moving, eerie, and dramatic, it’s both a visual spectacle and a vibrant ode to forgotten lives. (Oct.)