We Are a Haunting
A Novel
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
WINNER - 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree
Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
A Best Book of 2023 - NPR, Electric Literature, Largehearted Boy, Black Girl Nerds, Le Noir Auteur
"An absolute triumph." —Michael Schaub, NPR
"What a beautiful, haunting and hued narrative of American living. I’m in love with this story." —Jacqueline Woodson, MacArthur Fellow and author of Another Brooklyn
A poignant debut for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Jamel Brinkley, We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts: a story of hope and transformation.
In 1980’s Brooklyn, Key is enchanted with her world, glowing with her dreams. A charming and tender doula serving the Black women of her East New York neighborhood, she lives, like her mother, among the departed and learns to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, who is on the verge of losing the public housing apartment they once shared. Colly, Key’s grieving son, soon learns that he too has inherited this sacred gift and begins to slip into the liminal space between the living and the dead on his journey to self-realization.
In the present, an expulsion from school forces Colly across town where, feeling increasingly detached and disenchanted with the condition of his community, he begins to realize that he must, ultimately, be accountable to the place he is from. After college, having forged an understanding of friendship, kinship, community, and how to foster love in places where it seems impossible, Colly returns to East New York to work toward addressing structural neglect and the crumbling blocks of New York City public housing he was born to; discovering a collective path forward from the wreckages of the past.
A supernatural family saga, a searing social critique, and a lyrical and potent account of displaced lives, We Are a Haunting unravels the threads connecting the past, present, and future, and depicts the palpable, breathing essence of the neglected corridors of a pulsing city with pathos and poise.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Tyriek White’s debut is socially relevant, deeply moving, and downright trippy all at once. White uses a potent combination of poetry, realism, and the supernatural to make some major statements about Black life in America from the days of slavery to the present. Flowing back and forth between decades, the novel tells the story of a Black family in Brooklyn. In the 1980s, Key is a midwife of sorts who’s also coming to terms with her ability to contact the dead. In the present day, Key’s son, Colly, who has inherited her gift, attempts to use it to heal the pain of hundreds of years of oppression. White draws graceful connections between hip-hop sampling, literature, and Black history—and makes it look easy. The graceful but complex structure of We Are a Haunting is especially amazing from a first-timer. We can’t wait to read what White writes next.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
White follows a Brooklyn family across three generations in his poignant and poetic debut. Audrey, the grandmother, moves from North Carolina to Brooklyn, where she lives in the same apartment for 40 years before her rent is jacked up and she's evicted in the late 2000s, a year after the death of her daughter, Key, from cancer. Key's 14-year-old son, Colly, searches for ways to move on with a fractured family after his mother's death. Colly grieves not only his mother but also his neighborhood of East New York as it's broken apart by gentrification. In flashbacks set in the late 1980s, Key discovers an ability to see the dead, including people who were taken from Africa and enslaved in the American South. Now, Key becomes a transient spirit, watching over Colly as he comes of age in a lonely apartment, finding hope with an internship at MoMA and despair after seeing another kid get shot in his neighborhood. Each character is acutely aware of the weight of their forebears, which White uses to effectively tell a story that is both intimate and sweeping: "The problem was that the ghosts stayed with me. Each one left a shadow under my eye," Key laments. White works wonders with this inspired story of grief and the struggle for hope.
