After picking Happy Medium for Book of the Week yesterday, today we have some more books with ghosts in them for Recommendsday.
In that post yesterday I mentioned The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston, so that’s almost cheating at this point, but here we are, I’m doing it anyway. Obviously, it’s hard for a romance to have a happy ending when one half of the pairing is a ghost, so the romance end of this is slightly tangential. Also, I haven’t read this one yet because it’s not out til next month, but Kirsty Greenwood’s new book Love of my Afterlife has a heroine who meets the man of her dreams in the waiting room for the afterlife, and then has ten days to find him on earth and have a fresh start. So that totally counts right? It has a dead person back on earth…
In a screeching about turn in terms of tone, is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders which has Abraham Lincoln’s son stuck in a purgatory-like space with a bunch of other ghosts in a graveyard in Washington, while the civil war rages. It is more than a little strange, but it is one of the few award winning books that I’ve read over the last just-less-than-a-decade, and the audiobook has a properly starry cast.
It’s a long time since I recommended Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts in one of these Wednesday posts, but that still holds as a recommendation, as does Grave Expectations which was a BotW last year – and now has a sequel out!
There are also quite a lot of cozy crime series that feature ghosts somehow. Many of them were extremely not my cup of tea, but what I’ve read is Susan M Boyer’s Liz Talbot series (all the titles have Lowcountry in them) have been quite fun. And you could probably add Charmaine Harris’s Harper Connelly series, although she can find dead people, which isn’t quite the same as ghosts!
And finally, let’s not forget the Parasolverse, where people with excessive soul can become ghosts when they die – although they tend to be more side characters than main ones.
Happy Reading!