Ghost Fish
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Autostraddle's Most Anticipated Queer Books for August 2025 | Goodreads's 2025 Debut Novels to Discover Now
A tender coming-of-age novel about a young woman haunted by her sister’s death, who starts to believe that her beloved sibling has returned to her—in the form of a ghost fish, for fans of Sweetbitter and Our Wives Under the Sea.
Alison is mired in loneliness and grief. Freshly twenty-three and mourning the loss of her younger sister, who has drowned at sea, she’s moved out of her hometown and into a cramped apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Now she’s living the cliché, barely making rent as a restaurant hostess and avoiding her roommates, while watching the bright, busy passersby from her bubble of grief. She doesn’t need originality; she just needs to be alive.
Then, late one night, she rounds the corner and sees a shape in the air—a ghost. And how strange, it looks like a fish. What is it? Alison knows, without hesitation: it is her beloved sister, finally returned to her side. Safe in a pickle jar filled with water, the ghost fish goes wherever Alison does: in an alcove at the restaurant; in a tote bag on the subway; in her room at night as her roommates chatter outside. She knows she has to keep her safe from the world, the way she didn’t before. She knows that, together, they will never be lonely again. But as Alison’s new life in New York begins to grow, and as she navigates the murky waters of dating, friendship, and desire, she must ask: what if her sister is keeping her away from a life outwardly lived?
With tenderness and heart, stretching from New York City to Key West, Ghost Fish is a meditation on grief and loneliness, and the strange, kaleidoscopic ways we help ourselves—and those we love—through them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Pennebaker's uplifting if thinly plotted debut, a young Georgia woman attempts a fresh start in New York City after losing her sister, mother, and grandmother. Alison finds work as a host at a chic hotel restaurant "where celebrities sometimes maybe ate" and tells herself she "would be fine." Soon, her late sister appears in the form of a ghostly fish, "like a scrap of fog or a shadow, silver and hazy and floating near the door of my building." Not knowing what else to do, Alison lets the ghost swim into an old pickle jar and sets her on the windowsill in her tiny East Village bedroom. It's an arresting premise, but for much of the novel Pennebaker seems unsure how to capitalize on it. No one else can see Alison's ghost sister, so the apparition only serves to make Alison appear inward and strange. Her roommates wonder who she's talking to when she's alone in her room, and her friends and coworkers are constantly asking her what's wrong. A later section set in Key West, where Alison goes with a friend from the restaurant, is more successful, as she is at last able to unburden herself of the grief of her sister's death. The novel tests the reader's patience, but those who go the distance will be rewarded.
