An Epic Novel Haunted by the Ghosts of Colonialism

To whom does one life belong? As the man born Abel Paisley prepares to greet death, the question takes on a sudden urgency. At the beginning of her new novel, , Maisy Card sketches the swindler’s portrait: Decades prior, when his friend Stanford Solomon died on the job in England, Abel assumed the other Jamaican man’s identity. Leaving his old name and family behind, he claimed a life that was never his. “Where is his soul now?” Card writes of Stanford. “Circling the world, looking for a grave that does not yet exist?” doesn’t follow Stanford’s wandering soul, but it does trace the fallout of Abel’s decision over the next several decades. By the time the elderly man gathers his daughters and granddaughter in his Harlem brownstone in joins other recent novels that track troubled families over generations. But while books such as Yaa Gyasi’s transatlantic opus, , and Namwali Serpell’s Zambian epic, , home in on the experiences of their living characters, Card’s novel stretches beyond the earthly realm.