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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.
*An Entertainment Weekly, Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2020 Pick and Buzz Magazines Top New Book of the New Decade*
Stanford Solomons 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 Abels 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 Paisleys 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 beguilingvividly 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.
For Joan Wong, growing up in a Chinese family in the political turmoil of 1960s Guyana, family history is never straightforward. There are the examples of her grandmothers Clarice Chung, iron-willed matriarch who has ensured the family's survival through unremitting toil, with her pride in maintaining racial and cultural identity, and Susan Leo, whose failures have shamed the family, who found comfort from harsh poverty in relationships with two Indian men and adopting an Indian life-style. Later, when Joan Wong makes her own pilgrimage to ancestral China at the turn of the twenty-first century, there are surprises in store.
Jan Lowe Shinebourne is a Guyanese novelist who has published a collection of short stories and three novels; Timepiece (1986), The Last English Plantation and Chinese Women (2004). In addition to being an author, Shinebourne also worked in London as an editor for several journals, as a political and cultural activist and as a college and university lecturer. She now lives in Sussex.
Fear and bitterness pollute the ground from which the characters of these stories, mostly young and female, struggle to grow. With so many 'bad seeds', mostly male, taking root around them, with sexual violence, neglectful and brutal fathers, jealousy, lies and prejudice obscuring their light, their blossoming is always under threat. But in these diverse, subtly constructed stories, there is often a glimmer of hope: in a girl's tentative resistance to general prejudice about 'madmen'; or in the silence on a phone line between estranged friends, where forgiveness may or may not come.
In the stories set in Jamaica life is hard, and the comforts of 'away' are idealized. But in the cold of the streets of the North, there is no passport to success for the people of yard. Only their resilience, optimism, humour and friendship (and the comforts of beer and ganja) help them make their way. And in the 'diaspora dance' of the different immigrant nations struggling to find their place in Europe or North America, new connections and new possibilities are being created.
But if these stories are coolly unsentimental, there is also room for humour and moments of joy, as when Marie, a middle-aged Jamaican reggae singer, finds the sweet flavour of cane juice lingering on her young Brazilian lover's tongue.
Alecia McKenzie was born and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. Her short stories, Satellite City, won the Commonwealth Writers regional prize for the best first work in 1993.
THE SEQUEL TO THE 10 MILLION COPY BESTSELLER, THE COURAGE TO BE DISLIKED.
Embrace the psychology of courage. Find true contentment.
As with The Courage To Be Disliked, we follow a conversation between a philosopher and a student. The philosopher believes the key to a life of happiness and fulfilment lies in changing the way we think. Patiently, he explains to the young man the 'psychology of courage', taking him through how to build stronger relationships based on self-acceptance and respect, and demonstrating the profound changes it will bring to the way we live our lives.
True happiness is within your reach.