“Because who wants to be known as some kind of ho-bag haunt.”
Shannon Sanders’s debut novel The Great Wherever (Henry Holt 2026) might be my favorite ghost story of the year – it certainly has a couple of my favorite ghosts. The novel opens with Aubrey Lamb getting dumped. She was already floundering a bit, especially after her father died, and then to be dumped when she was anticipating a proposal? Of course, she jumps at the chance to get out of DC for a bit, joining the other three owners of the family farm in Tennessee to discuss a possible sale of the land. Aubrey quickly realizes there is significant value in the farm, and money is something that Aubrey could use.
What unfolds is a family saga that takes us back to when the land was built by slaves and our first ghost, the matriarch of the Lamb family. Without giving too much away, the novel involves years of family tension, inheritance, estate planning, adverse possession, rumors, and bad blood between siblings. Oh, and four remarkable family ghosts.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 