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Thanksgiving, homecoming, reunion - family ideals shared across generations and geography. But does reality ever live up to expectations? The Fiske family is gathered for a classically disjointed Thanksgiving, driven by old jealousies, dangerous misconceptions, and grudging love - the worst kind. The family table groans with the weight of guilt and blame. The result is a taut story of a twenty-first-century family’s unraveling, played against a famous nineteenth-century writer’s own family dysfunction.
"Berne takes an inherently dramatic conflict - one sister's intention to obfuscate the hard truths of the past vs. another's determination to drag them under a spotlight —and ratchets up the stakes with astute observation and narrative cunning." - PW starred review.
"This substantial tale of a dysfunctional family reunion promises a holiday, and a read, to remember." - Kirkus.
This information about The Ghost at the Table was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Avery Kimmell
Suzanne Berne is the author of the novels The Dogs of Littlefield, A Crime in the Neighborhood, A Perfect Arrangement, and The Ghost at the Table, as well as Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew, part biography and part memoir. She has taught at Harvard University as a Briggs-Copeland Fellow and at Wellesley College. Currently she teaches creative writing at Boston College and lives outside of Boston with her husband, Kenneth Kimmell, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and their two daughters.
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