The Spirits

The best-selling author of The Waters (a Read With Jenna Book Club Pick) returns with a tale of love, transgression, and the miraculous healing power of the holiday table.

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a master of rural American fiction, brings us a hair-raising winter tale to warm us by the fireside. In this contemporary Christmas Carol, Campbell has created a gritty, spooky, and ultimately heartening holiday story that unfolds in an isolated farmhouse. It is the night before Christmas in a small town in Michigan, and a young woman is haunted by her father’s death. She has been silently penitent for nine years, but her guilt and grief have estranged her from her community and her family. She has taken refuge in the natural world of the plants and trees she tends, but on this anniversary of the tragedy, the supernatural landscape is rattling its chains.

When a surprise guest appears at the (dreaded) Christmas Eve dinner, the family begins to open up and reveal dangerous secrets and crimes nobody is willing to face. Within this darkest chaos, a sliver of light appears, showing a way to reclaim communion and even a sense of humor. While redemption is never easy or wholesale, the story that a family creates together can heal wounds.

“Between the lines of this rollicking, haunted, humorous, aural, and choral Christmas Eve retelling of a family story grisly enough to make a reader squint, meanders one of the most accurate self-loathing-and-yet-somehow-determined-to-not-just-survive-but-thrive voices of a young woman battered by an abusive, patriarchal tyrant than any I have ever heard. I relate to Sister so fully and deeply, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. A haunting and a healing, all at once.”—Pam Houston, author of Animals Taught Me Everything