Michael Jonathan Hyde
I’m Michael Jonathan Hyde. Born in Salt Lake City, I spent years in California before settling in New Mexico, where I feel lucky to call home. I’ve worked with my hands all my life — starting as a construction laborer, working up to general contractor and into architecture, with time as a roughneck on oil rigs along the way. Everything I know in the trades, I taught myself.
I’m not a writer by trade, but I’ve taken the same self-taught approach to art and architecture — learning by standing in front of the thing itself, mostly on travels through Italy, France, and parts of the UK. This site is where I share what I’ve seen: the buildings, the art, the details most guidebooks skip. If you love the same things, I’m glad you’re here.
Featured Books
The Answer Was Yes
The Answer Was Yes — A retired journalist begins dreaming of a dead woman she never met, and drives two hundred miles to deliver the messages to the man the woman left behind.
The Door She Almost Closed — Eleven years after her husband walked out, a woman tucks a private note inside a beloved book and donates it to a library sale. A stranger finds it.
The Thing She Kept — A Louisiana widow with a terminal diagnosis buys a secondhand writing desk and discovers a decades-old letter in the drawer from a Montana rancher — so she writes back.
We Already Loved — A woman finds a strange untitled book on the wrong library shelf, filled with entries in many hands across many decades, and one of them is unmistakably about her.
Walk With Me is a sweeping story of first love, destiny, and the kind of connection that can shape a lifetime. When two teenagers meet just before a summer journey through Europe, an ordinary school trip becomes something unforgettable. From the streets of Rome to the beauty of Florence, the canals of Venice, and the lights of Paris, their bond deepens through stolen moments, shared dreams, and promises that feel larger than time itself.
But life does what life often does—it pulls people apart. Years pass. Letters fade. Paths change. Yet some loves never truly disappear.
Tender, emotional, and filled with longing, Walk With Me is a story about the people we carry with us, the roads we never forget, and the rare chance to find your way back to the one who always felt like home.
Walk With Me
Twenty-Three Tuesdays
Twenty-Three Tuesdays is a moving story about grief, unexpected connection, and the quiet courage it takes to love again. After the loss of her husband, Eleanor places an online ad out of financial desperation—never expecting it to lead to Paul, a widower carrying his own loneliness and history.
What begins as coffee on a Tuesday becomes a ritual neither of them can live without. Week by week, through honest conversations, shared silences, and the slow rebuilding of trust, two wounded hearts begin to imagine a future they thought was no longer possible.
Tender, wise, and deeply human, Twenty-Three Tuesdays is a novel about second chances, the healing power of being truly seen, and the extraordinary love that can arrive when life seems to have already decided your story is over.
The Journal is a hauntingly beautiful love story about grief, time, and the impossible ways we find each other when we need it most.
When thirteen-year-old Jackson moves into an old house after the death of his father, he discovers a hidden journal tucked behind a radiator. Inside are the private thoughts of a girl named Annie—written decades earlier. But when Jackson writes a reply on the blank page, Annie answers.
Separated by twenty-two years yet bound by the same house, the same streets, and the same growing need for one another, their connection deepens with every word. What begins as curiosity becomes friendship, then something far more powerful. But some distances are greater than time alone.
Tender, mysterious, and unforgettable, The Journal is a story about first love, second chances, and the extraordinary possibility that some hearts are meant to meet—no matter when they exist.
The Journal
Lily
Lily is a deeply moving story about first love, quiet courage, and the people who save us without ever asking for credit.
When sixteen-year-old Ethan begins his sophomore year, he’s carrying more than books. At home, his mother is slowly dying, his father is gone, and the weight of adulthood has settled on his shoulders far too soon. At school, he keeps it all hidden—until Lily notices him.
What begins as a simple friendship grows into something neither of them fully understands at first. But Lily sees beyond Ethan’s careful silence, and in doing so becomes part of the fragile world he has tried so hard to protect. As loss draws near, their bond deepens into a love shaped not by grand gestures, but by presence, loyalty, and the quiet decision to stay.
Tender, wise, and unforgettable, Lily is a novel about grief, healing, and the extraordinary ways love can find us when we need it most.
What She Answered
For five years, the marble has waited under a drop cloth in the corner of Sam Chappell's studio. For two months and four days, he has been talking on the telephone, every evening, to a woman named Elan — a translator he has never met, whose voice has begun to feel like the only true thing in his quiet widower's life in Buffalo, Wyoming.
On the first Tuesday of February, Sam uncovers the stone. He doesn't yet know that the woman on the other end of the line has been answering his questions with a life that isn't quite hers, or that the answer to who she really is has been sitting in a box in his own upstairs room — left there, years ago, by a wife who had loved the same book.
A luminous, slow-burning novel about late love, the figures we carve from longing, and the strange grace of being known by someone who barely knows herself.
The Architect is a haunting novel about ambition, love, and the cost of a miracle.
When struggling architect Marcus wakes to find a set of brilliant house plans on his drafting table—plans he did not draw—his failing career is suddenly transformed. But hidden beneath the drawings is a warning: This comes with a price.
As the mysterious house is built, impossible details begin appearing, and Marcus discovers the plans belong to a dead architect whose final masterpiece was meant for someone else.
Elegant, emotional, and unforgettable, The Architect is a story of redemption, sacrifice, and love that reaches beyond death.
The Architect
What She Answered
For five years, the marble has waited under a drop cloth in the corner of Sam Chappell's studio. For two months and four days, he has been talking on the telephone, every evening, to a woman named Elan — a translator he has never met, whose voice has begun to feel like the only true thing in his quiet widower's life in Buffalo, Wyoming.
On the first Tuesday of February, Sam uncovers the stone. He doesn't yet know that the woman on the other end of the line has been answering his questions with a life that isn't quite hers, or that the answer to who she really is has been sitting in a box in his own upstairs room — left there, years ago, by a wife who had loved the same book.
A luminous, slow-burning novel about late love, the figures we carve from longing, and the strange grace of being known by someone who barely knows herself.