We Are a Haunting: A Novel [Paperback]

“You are where we have always existed. Where I falls away from You and the welling you’ve felt all along, all from living, spills out. You are home, and we are with you.” This is the Black diaspora transcending time and space. It suggests that the Black “I” cannot precede the Black “we”—nor should it.
-Omari Weekes, The New York Review of Books

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