Five novels with ghostly narrators

Mamta Chaudhry is the author of Haunting Paris: A Novel.

At LitHub she tagged five novels recounted by the dead, including:

Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

The ringing of the Angelus bell on All Souls Day summons Marcus Conway back to this world, “a revenant who has returned to his house at some grey hour to find the place boarded up and abandoned.” Overcome by longing for his family—his wife Mairead, his children Agnes and Darragh—he reflects on his own place in the world from which he is now displaced.

As he reconstructs “that memorial arc which curves from childhood to the present moment,” he luxuriates in the overlooked delights of an ordinary day in an ordinary life, on the quotidian moments unremarkable in themselves, moments touched with “intimate grace.” Such clarity comes only with hindsight, just as when toppled buildings create “both the light and lens through which the disaster can properly be seen.” Death has provided the vacant space from which Marcus Conway can take the full measure of his life, a life that unspools in a single, fluid sentence, blurring the edges between past and present, as well as “the mearing between this world and the next,” the rhythms of the prose echoing the triple chimes of the Angelus bell, and it is fitting that there are no stops, because death has already provided the period so deliberately omitted from the narrative.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue