The advertisements used to speckle the newspapers, those local to resort towns like Rehoboth and Dewey as well as those of the cities whose residents call the beach their second homes. Although those ads are more likely to be web-based, the need is the same: sharehouse members wanted.

A sharehouse—for those of you fortunate enough to have always had a second home to call your very own—is usually a living situation were one or two individuals arrange for a large group of people to share the use of a rented house. Each sharehouse member might be allocated via an agreed-upon schedule a set area to use and/or a set week or days to use that area. The arrangement is not like that of a commune, which usually has a unifying ideology. Instead, the sharehouse might be a loosely-knit web of friends and collected strangers. While many of my friends would extol the virtues and describe the fun that such an arrangement can spontaneously create, I’d bet that many of them would also agree that whenever a large group shares a public space, the idiosyncrasies inherent to human relationships emerge.

What happens when very different people dealing with the complexities of their own relationships as parent, sibling, partner, or friend, come together in a very public way? What about if that group were placed in a stressful situation? In her latest novel, Lost and Found, author Carolyn Parkhurst presents several possibilities.

Although reality shows have been around since the advent of television, in 1992 MTV unleashed the current influx of reality television shows with The Real World, one of the longest-running reality shows that, interestingly enough, features what boils down to a sharehouse gone bad. America (and Canada among others) couldn’t seem to get enough of watching the interactions of total strangers living in close quarters under duress. Parkhurst looks beyond the highly and selectively-edited footage that viewers see to unveil the hidden stories. Her characters have all been selected to compete in the latest reality show called Lost and Found (cue the corny music). Much like today’s Amazing Race, teams in the fictional show race against each other all over the continent, collecting odd treasures and—voluntarily—participating in demeaning tasks that attempt to break them down and expose the worst of their private thoughts on national television.

Readers get their first introduction to the secrets behind the camera with the introduction of Laura, a widowed mother of Cassie, her teenaged daughter and Lost and Found teammate. Laura’s secret is a whopper: just four months before the show began filming, her daughter gave birth to a baby in her attic bedroom. Laura, who admits she was both preoccupied but also trying to be sensitive about Cassie’s weight, didn’t even know her daughter was pregnant. The secret, which Cassie secretly shares with the show’s producers, is juicy enough to earn the pair a place on the show. Laura, who tried out for the show as a way to bond with her daughter while seeing the world, and Cassie are just one example of the diverse issues plaguing the set.

Parkhurst exploded into fiction with her 2003 bestseller The Dogs of Babel, a novel about a linguist who tries to solve his wife’s mysterious death by teaching his dog—who witnessed the death—to talk. The format for Lost and Found is a little different. It doesn’t have the strangely mythical quality of Dogs, for one. Parkhurst experiments with multiple perspectives in the new book; each chapter is told by a different person involved with the show. She manages to take on the personas of the icy host, two former child celebrities, two newly-divorced brothers, and a recently married couple who met through their ex-gay ministry. Needless to say, they all have very different agendas that manifest themselves in their spoken words, their private thoughts, and their action on and off-camera.

The gay theme actually runs even deeper than the mixed-up, repressed façade of a marriage that Justin and Abby desperately try to use to educate the viewers about the miracles of God. While one character reveals confusion about an emerging sexuality, another tries to manipulate and capitalize on that confusion for personal gain. When these and other off-camera secrets escalate out of control, the host and producers step in to fully capture the tension in shameless detail. (Of course they did, that’s the whole point of reality shows, isn’t it? To construct a reality so embarrassing it makes us feel better about the drama of our own lives.) The results are oddly charming. While the television audience will most likely find the contestants’ responses to their syrupy exit interview question, "what have you found?", somewhat trite—or, frighteningly enough, deeply meaningful—the contestants themselves did find something important on their journey: an appreciation for the sharehouse-style risks of human interaction, with all its exhilarating trials, that just can’t be controlled.