Maisy Card: “There is this hazy quality to my family history that no amount of research can clarify.”
In a way, every family story is a ghost story. Memories become tales, and tales—when repeated over and over—can become legends, and the lost figures who star in them take on a mythic quality. Novels about family sagas can help us plumb the depths of our own histories even further, nudging us to consider the past’s tentacle-like grasp on our present and future.
Maisy Card did just that in the writing and research for her debut novel, , born out of her receding closeness and connection to her family in Jamaica. Wanting to investigate her own history as well as her home country’s culture, Card began sketching a series of stories following characters she had encountered there or hoped to see brought to life. The end result is a novel-in-stories that follows the ancestors, descendants, and relations of a fictional Jamaican man named Abel Paisley. In Card’s telling, in the 1970s Paisley faked his own death, abandoning his wife and daughter for a new wife in England and then a life in New York. A family tree laid out in the novel’s opening pages offers a glimpse of the narrators who follow, each of their tales entangled in the family drama, revealing how the actions of one man can have a butterfly effect in lives beyond his own—including those of his children in New York and Jamaica, deceased wives, and a generations-removed female relative descended from a slave owner. The book is an expansive portrait of history, family, and the inextricable
