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    These Ghosts are Family: A Novel
    These Ghosts are Family: A Novel
    These Ghosts are Family: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    These Ghosts are Family: A Novel

    Written by Maisy Card

    Narrated by Karl O’Brian Williams

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist​
    Shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

    A “rich, ambitious debut novel” (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

    Stanford Solomon’s shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley.

    And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.

    These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of a single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the houseboy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.

    This “rich and layered story” (Kirkus Reviews) explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is a “beguiling…vividly drawn, and compelling” (BookPage, starred review) portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 3, 2020
    ISBN9781797103891
    Author

    Maisy Card

    Maisy Card holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and is a public librarian. Her writing has appeared in Lenny Letter, School Library Journal, Agni, Sycamore Review, Liars’ League NYC, and Ampersand Review. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. Maisy earned an MLIS from Rutgers University and a BA in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University. She is the author of These Ghosts Are Family.

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    Reviews for These Ghosts are Family

    4/5

    171 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      This novel is reminiscent of Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homecoming. It is really a set of interlocking short stories with many, many characters and a series of short narratives comprising the history of several related families. I started this novel enthusiastically but it lost steam for me around the half-way mark. I wearied of new characters being introduced into a convoluted series of interlocking stories. This was capped off in the ending with a magical realism element based upon a Jamaican folk tale. It was a miss for me but I know many will (and do) love it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The story of a Jamaican family told at different periods in time, ranging from present day to slavery times. A look into how certain actions can affect future generations. As a Jamaican-American woman many of the characters reminded me of people I have known at some point in my life. The narrator voice and accent added an extra flair which made the story leap off of the pages.

      I loved this book!
    • 5/5
      Definitely worth reading! Thoroughly enjoyed this. Strong debut by Maisy Card.
    • 5/5
      Peak Jamaican man- fakes his death to avoid familial responsibilities and that's just the start of this family's secrets.

      The most complicated and accurate fiction book I've read this year that reaches deep and wide into understanding the post-colonial impact on families, all of these stories were believable and uncomfortably familiar.

      To be honest, the first couple of chapters were a drag. When I started this book earlier this year I had to put it down because it was contributing to my reading slump. I decided to try the audiobook instead, and Karl O'Brian Williams deserves awards for his performance. He brought the story to life for me and did an AMAZING job of bringing across the range of emotions and in many parts, and the twisted humour of Jamaicans to tek serious tings mek joke.

      I enjoyed the latter half of this book thoroughly. The delicate, yet intense, layers Maisy Card puts together to make this family's tree deep, twisted, and wide, is not your typical debut.
    • 1/5
      I wanted to love it but no connections circling back. Too segmented.
    • 4/5
      Cute book that I listened to and enjoy it a lot.
    • 3/5
      Hard to follow but interesting story nonetheless. Listen on normal speed
    • 3/5
      Started out pretty good and then it got very confusing. So many timelines so many stories. I would have wanted to learn about about Abel but instead it went on and on and on about the history.
    • 4/5
      Well written. Very different! It’s really a series of stories about extended Jamaican families loosely threaded together throughout the book. Great insight into Jamaican culture. Really enjoyed the Jamaican accent, although at times SO thick it was impossible to understand and so I missed out on some of it!

      Also, hard to distinguish between some of the characters and I thought perhaps there should have been at least two different narrators, at least one woman to narrate the female characters.