I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This novel covers the legitimate and illegitimate offspring of a skaving family in Jamaica. The cruelty of slavery is interspersed with the beauty of the Jamaican culture and the ability of the slaves and their descendants to thrive in spite of their circumstances.

A novel about a Jamaican man working in England faking his death and the subsequent consequences for his family. These Ghosts are Family starts out strong, but unravels into loosely related stories.

Multigenerational story from Jamaica to Queens. Starts with a family secret/intrigue and goes from there. I struggled a bit with the phonetically written dialog.

A set of interconnected stories (though written as a novel) about the people whose lives were impacted by the faked death of Abel Paisley 30 years before. Spanning colonial Jamaica to present day New York City and times and places in between, we live alongside his “widow” as she struggles with single motherhood, the children from his two lives that are unaware of each other’s existence, and Abel (ow Stanford Soloman) himself.

The writing is excellent and full of raw emotion — and the emotions are not happy ones. Anger, need, guilt, and bitterness pervade the colorful surroundings. Plenty of drama — affairs, unwanted pregnancies, drug addiction. This is not a community of happy people and although the writing was excellent, I found it a bit heavy. I did enjoy the brief recap of Rastafarianism and their belief in worshiping Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia as the living God — I had forgotten all of that.

For now, more towards the publishing date.

An amazing novel, a must read, One of the the best historical novel, describing Jamaica, it's people, traditions, superstitions, I have read many novels and historical novels regarding Jamaica, Maisy Card is an author to admire and follow.

The premise of These Ghosts Are Family is fantastic - the elderly Stanford Solomon has decided to reveal to his family that he is actually Abel Paisley, a man who stole the identity of his dead best friend. Abel remains a mystery for much of the book - which I don't really mind - and the bulk of his story is recounted by his female relatives: his first wife and their eldest daughter, his granddaughter from his second marriage, his illegitimate daughter from an affair. This contemporary family drama is intertwined with accounts of their enslaved ancestors in colonial Jamaica.

Maisy Card is a fantastic writer, but it would be fairer to call this book a collection of interconnected short stories - it is a little too disjointed for a novel. I think it really suffers from lacking a chapter from the perspective of Vera, Abel's second wife, and glimpses into their daughter's childhood. And while the last chapter, on its own, is an excellent ghost story, it ends the novel on a bizarre note as no magical realism had been present before.