Beyond Story: An Interview and Conversation with Maisy Card

Published: Feb. 25, 2022, 10:19 p.m.

b'\\u201cHarlem. 2005. Let\\u2019s say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death.\\u201d 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 \\u201ca 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.\\u201d Hannah Giorgis of the Atlantic wrote that the novel \\u201cmoves across time and space as it deftly weaves the families\\u2019 paths . . . a tale of the most monstrous acts: intimate betrayals with unthinkable consequences.\\u201d Bookpage, in my favorite single line of any review of this book, said \\u201cThere is magic in these pages.\\u201d'