These Ghosts Are Family
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Karl O’Brian Williams
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By:
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Maisy Card
About this listen
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, 30-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.
©2020 Maisy Card (P)2020 Simon & SchusterListeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Sydney Henderson is a truly great man. As a young man, Sydney, believing he has accidentally killed a friend, makes a pact with God, promising never to harm another if the boy's life is spared. In the years that follow, the almost pathologically gentle Sydney holds true to his promise - at terrible cost to himself and his family. Stunningly beautiful and haunting, scenes from this magisterial novel will remain etched in the mind forever.
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Epic story
- By jhar14 on 06-04-22
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She Wouldn't Change a Thing
- By: Sarah Adlakha
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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When 39-year-old Maria Forssmann wakes up in her 17-year-old body, she doesn’t know how she got there. All she does know is she has to get back: to her home in Bienville, Mississippi, to her job as a successful psychiatrist and, most importantly, to her husband, daughters, and unborn son.
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Very Religious
- By Gabrielle Glendening on 11-18-21
By: Sarah Adlakha
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Belle Cora
- A Novel
- By: Phillip Margulies
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat, Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 25 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the home where Arabella Godwin was raised it is forbidden to speak her name, and her picture is turned to the wall. But in the turbulent America of the 1850s, everyone knows her as "Belle Cora", madam of San Francisco's finest bordello. Judges and senators do her bidding; a vicious newspaper editor plots her downfall; a preacher looks at her from across his pulpit and tries to forget that once she was his wife. Merchant's daughter, farm girl, prostitute, mother - the only thing that never changes is her tireless pursuit of the one man who can see her for who she really is.
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excellent
- By Patricia on 05-15-20
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Don't Look for Me
- A Novel
- By: Wendy Walker
- Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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One night, Molly Clarke walked away from her life. She doesn't want to be found. Or at least, that's the story. The car abandoned miles from home. The note found at a nearby hotel. The shattered family that couldn’t be put back together. They called it a “walk away.” It happens all the time. Women disappear, desperate to leave their lives behind and start over. But is that what really happened to Molly Clarke?
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Better than Gone Girl!
- By Kristen Harris on 09-17-20
By: Wendy Walker
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Two Crosses
- Secrets of the Cross, Book 1
- By: Elizabeth Musser
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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The glimmering Huguenot cross she so innocently wears leads her deep into the shadows. When Gabriella Madison arrives in the French village of Castelnau in 1961 to continue her university studies, she doesn’t anticipate being drawn into the secretive world behind the Algerian war for independence from France. And the further she delves into the war efforts, the more her faith is challenged. The people who surround her bring a whirlwind of transforming forces.
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Faith, Romance, Spies, and Fascinating History
- By Amazon Customer on 05-02-19
By: Elizabeth Musser
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The Past Is Never
- A Novel
- By: Tiffany Quay Tyson
- Narrated by: Devon Sorvari
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.
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Intriguing Southern gothic tale
- By Robert Jason on 03-11-20
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Black Boy
- By: Richard Wright
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.
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Outstanding
- By Trevin Harvey on 11-11-20
By: Richard Wright
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Everything Is Illuminated
- By: Jonathan Safran Foer
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
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Astounding reading
- By bookworm123abc on 02-10-23
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- By: Maya Angelou
- Narrated by: Maya Angelou
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age - and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. But years later, she learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors.
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Emotional & Powerful
- By Miss Toni on 06-30-13
By: Maya Angelou
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Say I'm Dead
- A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
- By: E. Dolores Johnson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.
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Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
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The Creepypasta Collection
- Modern Urban Legends You Can’t Unread
- By: MrCreepyPasta - editor
- Narrated by: Heather Costa, Jeffrey Kafer
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A terrifying, thrilling collection of must-listen horror stories chock-full of nightmarish supernatural beings and the murderously disturbed that are sure to keep you up all night long.
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creepy definitely
- By Danh on 01-16-22
What listeners say about These Ghosts Are Family
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-09-24
Couldn’t get through it
I like complicated characters and stories. For this one, I found the idea of the ghosts we carry appealing, especially as they take the form of our regrets. But, I do need at least one character to either like, resonate with, or root for. Half way through, and I didn’t like or connect with a single one. I gave up.
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- Kathy
- 05-20-20
So hard to listen to
First off this was a recommended book from Audible that’s what made me give it a listen. I wanted to like this book but I couldn’t. It was so disjointed. The one thing I liked about it was getting a glimpse of plantation life in Jamaica. But I never could figure out how all the characters fit together and the ending was odd but blessedly it was the ending. It’s the first audio book I have struggled to finish. The accent it was read in was heavy, which I expected but it made it difficult to understand what was being said at times. Given a do over I would pick another book.
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3 people found this helpful
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- N. Bradley
- 05-06-20
Whew Child! What a tale!
Loved this audio version! Very entertaining and captavating. This novel left the listener wanting more. Some closure is needed.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Candice R
- 10-27-20
Entertaining... but a few stories in one.
the book was very entertaining. I struggled through some parts... I don't particularly chronological jumps.
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- IamwhoIam
- 02-08-21
absolutely wonderful
Loved every minute of this book! Kudos to the narrator for bringing this breathtaking novel to life.
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- Danielle Roberge
- 09-11-20
I read this for school
I just got done with the book and I am still not fully sure what I read. The man who read it did an amazing job but that dosent make up for how many times this book jumps back and forth though time.
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- Julia Murphy
- 05-18-20
Confusing
Jumps around in time which is confusing. I had trouble remembering who's related to who. After many chapters about people searching for their ancestors, at the end was suddenly a vampire story. I had trouble sometimes understanding the narrator's Jamaican accent.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Marlon
- 05-01-20
Wow
This was a phenomenal book that had me hooked the entire listen. Being the only American born in a Jamaican family, I was able to really attach myself to this story because some portions sounded relatable. One half of my family is native to Morant Bay in St. Thomas, Jamaica so my ears were even more attentive. Thank you Maisy for this work of art. You’ve inspired me to keep writing and to publish my first book soon. Keep writing and I will look for more great stories from you.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Lala
- 08-08-21
Too many loose ends!
I loved so much of this book, but was disappointed by the sideways direction it took and never returned from...
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- Brittany
- 03-27-20
This narration!!!
This narration is just amazing. Flawlessly performance of a stunning debut. I can't wait to see what Card and Williams come up with next.
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10 people found this helpful