47 Houses on the Long Journey Home is a big story; a story of love and adventure spanning decades and continents. Two young people set out on a search that takes them from America's midwest to Hong Kong's Suzy Wong area, from life as sheltered expats to living in an old fishing village on the South China Sea and aboard an ocean-going junk in a typhoon shelter, speaking Chinese. Why? Not even they seem to know. Deeper than the apparent reasons there is a keen longing to delve into life, to find that basic root of what it means to be human.

The De Prees and their four children always plan to come back to a li le town in the US - soon...and a fter twenty years in Hong Kong and ten years in the Middle East, gaining new understandings of culture and art, they finally make it. On a chance trip to the mountains of North Carolina they fall in love with a big blue mountain, a creek, and a whole community of artists, singers and warm-hearted people - And house number 47, which finally becomes home.



Lenore De Pree comes from strong Dutch stock in Chicago, was raised in the back hills of Appalachian Kentucky where her parents took in 90 homeless children, and has been trying to tie worlds together ever since. Now that her worlds include Chinese and Arabian cultures, the scope has expanded.

De Pree alternates between writing and oil painting, searching between colors and words to express a deep-felt response to life. She has published books in New York and in the midwest.

Life now consists of working with husband Gordon in an art gallery in West Jefferson, North Carolina, high up in the Blue Ridge mountains- and enjoying their grown children and grandchildren.