The Space Between Ordinary

By Louise Van Esse

What if the place you were looking for was never a destination, but a room?

Louise Van Esse has always been a wanderer. As a child, she disappeared into imaginary countries from the safety of her backyard trampoline. As an adult, she's crossed deserts in Africa, lived out of a van in the Pacific Northwest, and backpacked across Europe with a bag that never quite closed right. She has always preferred driving to flying, because a road lets you go anywhere, while a plane only lets you arrive.

It began, almost by accident, in a coffee shop in the Ozarks, where a badly ordered espresso and a room full of strangers taught her something she didn't yet have words for: that some rooms hold you the moment you walk into them, whether or not you have any reason to stay.

The Space Between Ordinary follows Louise across nine unforgettable stops on a journey that spans continents:

A desert bakery in Namibia built by a widow determined to give an empty landscape a reason to notice her
A Pacific Northwest coffee shop whose whiteboard becomes a lifeline for an entire community with no fixed address
A Portuguese village square fighting to save the caf that has fed it for forty-three years
A shop in the Balkans where two old enemies quietly begin sharing a table, and never explain why
A family-run caf in Vietnam that claims a lost, soaked traveler as one of its own within a single evening
A high-altitude town in Peru that refuses, gently and completely, to be rushed
A hollowed-out shop back home that teaches her the cost of a room that's forgotten what it used to be

Each stop leaves her with a little more of the answer to a question she didn't know she was asking, until she finally has enough of it to build something of her own.

Part travelogue, part meditation on community and belonging, The Space Between Ordinary is a novel for anyone who has ever sat in a room, a coffee shop, a kitchen, a stranger's kindness, and felt, for reasons they couldn't quite name, like they'd found their way home.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HBFP9JVH
• ISBN13: 9798188711610
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 154 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"