Summary: “Harlem. 2005. Let’s say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death.” Thus begins These Ghosts Are Family, the debut novel of Maisy Card. Published in 2020, These Ghosts Are Family is the intergenerational story of the Paisley Family, one that harbors many secrets, including the faked death of Abel Paisely, which starts the book, and how the family grapples with history, trauma, slavery, White guilt, abandonment, poverty, and the Jamaican diaspora, among many other issues. Mia Alvar of the New York Times Book Review described the book as “a rich, ambitious debut novel, [where the] the ghosts bracingly remind [the reader] that no family history is comprehensive, that some riddles of ancestry and heritage persist beyond this lifetime.” Hannah Giorgis of the Atlantic wrote that the novel “moves across time and space as it deftly weaves the families’ paths . . . a tale of the most monstrous acts: intimate betrayals with unthinkable consequences.” Bookpage, in my favorite single line of any review of this book, said “There is magic in these pages.”
