Family Ghosts

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.

Hardship and adventure seemed to be in their DNA. Their Scots-Irish roots had led them to a one room cabin in the country outside of Durham, North Carolina where they huddled around a wood stove for heat in the winter and spent summers outdoors playing in the creek to stay cool. The chance to buy the old farmhouse on the hill seemed like a small step closer to doing just a little bit better in life for the Jackson family. What they did not know was that they would share the home with former residents that were not ready to give the house up. Foot-steps, banging doors and phantom odors gave way to full body apparitions and demonic visitors. The house seemed to lift the blinders from the eyes of the family and allowed them to experience other worldly encounters wherever they went.Their shared experiences would bond them forever, and the little white farmhouse would be a beacon for them - reminding them of the love, pain, laughter and tears they shared there. The terrifying paranormal experiences were woven into the family threads and tied their stories together forever.

Elizabeth Wilton, recently widowed,community college teacher, parent, grandmother,decides to take leave from her employment. She travels back to the town where she used to visit her grandparents to revisit the memories of her childhood. The deep secret she carries hidden within her is revealed when a freak accident opens her secret to the local doctor who seeks a way for her to heal both physically and emotionally. Elizabeth, not a cooperative patient, is fighting to keep her secret locked up inside her. Several persons become involved as she slowly responds to the gentle but firm nudging of God. Everyone, it seems, has some hidden secret that they are carrying around in their own lives.

Every family has ghost stories. They are collected and told from person-to-person, generation-to-generation. They're told over campfires or at slumber parties. They're told on long drives down lonely country roads. In this short-story anthology, thirteen real-life experiences with the paranormal have been collected. The stories in this book contain tales about ouija boards, an Indigo child who could see the dead, Bigfoot roaming the Boundary Waters, an archangel delivering presents, and the ghosts that haunt hospitals and prisons. Each story in this collection was told to the author by the people who experienced the event, or by a member of that person's family. Every family has metaphorical ghosts. Some even have real ones.

The Great Michigan Read 2013-14 Michigan Notable Book for 2010 A Washington Post Book World's "Best Books of 2009," Memoir Beth Luxenberg was an only child. Or so everyone thought. Six months after Beth's death, her secret emerged. It had a name: Annie. Steve Luxenberg's mother always told people she was an only child. It was a fact that he'd grown up with, along with the information that some of his relatives were Holocaust survivors. However, when his mother was dying, she casually mentioned that she had had a sister she'd barely known, who early in life had been put into a mental institution. Luxenberg began his researches after his mother's death, discovering the startling fact that his mother had grown up in the same house with this sister, Annie, until her parents sent Annie away to the local psychiatric hospital at the age of 23. Annie would spend the rest of her life shut away in a mental institution, while the family erased any hints that she had ever existed. Through interviews and investigative journalism, Luxenberg teases out her story from the web of shame and half-truths that had hidden it. He also explores the social history of institutions such as Eloise in Detroit, where Annie lived, and the fact that in this era (the 40s and 50s), locking up a troubled relative who suffered from depression or other treatable problems was much more common than anyone realizes today.

In this timely and profoundly original new book, bestselling writer and physician Gabor Maté looks at the epidemic of addictions in our society, tells us why we are so prone to them and what is needed to liberate ourselves from their hold on our emotions and behaviours. For over seven years Gabor Maté has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV and, in many cases, all four. But if Dr. Maté’s patients are at the far end of the spectrum, there are many others among us who are also struggling with addictions. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, work, food, sex, gambling and excessive inappropriate spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such self-destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our lives? Beginning with a dramatically close view of his drug addicted patients, Dr. Maté looks at his own history of compulsive behaviour. He weaves the stories of real people who have struggled with addiction with the latest research on addiction and the brain. Providing a bold synthesis of clinical experience, insight and cutting edge scientific findings, Dr. Maté sheds light on this most puzzling of human frailties. He proposes a compassionate approach to helping drug addicts and, for the many behaviour addicts among us, to addressing the void addiction is meant to fill. I believe there is one addiction process, whether it manifests in the lethal substance dependencies of my Downtown Eastside patients, the frantic self-soothing of overeaters or shopaholics, the obsessions of gamblers, sexaholics and compulsive internet users, or in the socially acceptable and even admired behaviours of the workaholic. Drug addicts are often dismissed and discounted as unworthy of empathy and respect. In telling their stories my intent is to help their voices to be heard and to shed light on the origins and nature of their ill-fated struggle to overcome suffering through substance use. Both in their flaws and their virtues they share much in common with the society that ostracizes them. If they have chosen a path to nowhere, they still have much to teach the rest of us. In the dark mirror of their lives we can trace outlines of our own. —from In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

From the author of Bough Down, a found, collaged and lovingly amended inquiry into how women disappear Artist and writer Karen Green's second book originated in a search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. In her absence, Green has constructed an elliptical arrangement of artifacts from an untold life. In this rescued history, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous; an adolescence ripe with desire and scarred by violation and loss; and an adulthood in which she strives to sing above the incessant din of violence. Constance--one half of a sister duo put to work performing as musical prodigies in the dirt-poor town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. during the Great Depression--escapes as a teenager to the USO and tours a ravaged Italy during World War II. Soon after she returns to an unsparing life in New York City, she disappears. Green traces her dissolution in a deftly composed trove of letters Constance writes to her beloved sister and those she receives from dozens of men smitten by her stage persona, along with her drawings, collages and altered photographs. Though told mostly from Constance's point of view, Frail Sister is also haunted by the voices of the transient, the absent and the dead. The letters (a few real, many invented) expose not only the quotidian reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief. Nimble, darkly funny and poignant, Frail Sister is possessed by the disappeared, giving voice to the voiceless, bringing into a focus a life disintegrating at every edge.

Ghosts aren’t meant to stick around forever... Shelly and her grandmother catch ghosts. In their hair. Just like all the women in their family, they can see souls who haven’t transitioned yet; it’s their job to help the ghosts along their journey. When Shelly’s mom dies suddenly, Shelly’s relationship to ghosts—and death—changes. Instead of helping spirits move on, Shelly starts hoarding them. But no matter how many ghost cats, dogs, or people she hides in her room, Shelly can’t ignore the one ghost that’s missing. Why hasn’t her mom’s ghost come home yet? Rooted in a Cree worldview and inspired by stories about the author’s great-grandmother’s life, The Ghost Collector delves into questions of grief and loss, and introduces an exciting new voice in tween fiction that will appeal to fans of Kate DiCamillo’s Louisiana’s Way Home and Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls.