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 … 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.
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Every family’s got secrets but Abel Paisley’s secret is monstrous and mesmerizing. These Ghosts are Family begins with energy and intrigue and, really, never lets up. This book is painful and shocking but it can be funny as hell, too. What a talented writer. Maisy Card has written one of the best debut novels I’ve read in many years.
I suspect many readers will talk about the consequences of unspoken generational trauma in These Ghosts Are Family, but I’m most amazed by the deft use of characterization, place and embodiment here. This book is a master class in writing home as a collection of odd spirits and a mobile metaphor.
These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card was unlike anything else I’ve read. Each chapter, though related to the others, is written in a different style. There’s an invitation in the first chapter to “suppose you…” which places the reader in the storyteller’s realm. It reads at times like a fairy tale, at others a recounting of a Caribbean myth. The story line is non-linear and varied in approach. To me, it felt like pawing through old photo albums and scrap books while hearing stories about the pictures from Grandparents and aunts. It is unique.
An amazingly rich debut novel that explores generational secrets that stayed with me long after I finished the novel.
One of the best pieces of literature I’ve read in a while. The story of eight generations of a family from Jamaica to New York, from slavery to Masters Degree. What is each person’s role in this life and the lives of the next generations to come?
I received a copy of These Ghosts Are Family from Simon and Schuster as a winner of their book giveaway. The opinions in this review are my own.
First and foremost, I can’t believe that this is Maisy Card’s debut novel! I couldn’t put it down.
This book really makes you take stock of your own life and family.
The secrets that this family kept were like a tangled web. One lie leading to the next and the next just to keep the secrets.
Abel Paisley seen an opportunity to start life anew when his childhood friend is tragically killed in London aboard a cargo ship on which they had both been employed. He thought about his young family in Jamaica and how they could collect insurance money if he were to die. From that moment forward he became Stanford Solomon. He moved to New York and started a new life. Meanwhile, his family back in Jamaica, wife and two children, were left to believe him dead.
As the story of Solomon is being told in the present, the past is also brought to the light. The lives of his ancestors, his first wife and children, and the story of his family in New York (especially his daughter and granddaughter) are told.
I felt these characters. They were so well developed. Parts of the story were heartbreaking. Other parts made me feel anger towards situations and the mistreatment of the characters. I felt that I was in the book, a part of it, only observing but with an emotional attachment.
Thank you Maisy Card for such a beautifully written book. I highly recommend this to readers of any and every genre.
Maisy Card is a great writer. Her compelling debut evokes the richness of culture and the inevitable impact of generational secrets, full of magnificent characters that continue to haunt me.
Through Maisy Card’s immersive storytelling, These Ghosts Are Family explores the intersections of generational trauma, love, and long-held family secrets, showing what it means to build a life in the face of history. I was hooked from page one.
Maisy Card’s relentlessly inventive debut is a thrilling exploration of family, memory and which pasts we choose to haunt us.
Written with the brand of Jamaican humor I know and love, These Ghosts Are Family is a book I didn’t know I needed to read, which might be the best kind of book. Maisy Card is a wonderful arrival for Caribbean literature.
These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card will enchant readers completely with a fascinating cast of characters, each more bewitching than the last. This book is destined to become 2020’s most beloved debut novel.
In this fascinating debut, Maisy Card reveals her spectacular range and scope. Part immigrant narrative, part ghost story, part historical fiction, part family drama, These Ghosts Are Family explores and illuminates the complexities of race and lineage in Jamaica and the United States. This is a bold, gripping, compassionate book.