Time dilates for young children, Shannon Sanders writes in The Great Wherever, and also for ghosts. Ghosts can reclaim time in which to grieve, gossip and watch their earthly relatives in horror, pity and love. Sometimes the dead can bridge silences in family lineage too.

If this sounds fanciful, let me convince you otherwise. Ghosts have always been more than mysterious spectres in African American culture and in this novel a plot of land connects the living and the dead in surreal and unexpected ways.

Set in rural Tennessee and Washington DC, this intriguing and moving multi-generational family saga flows seamlessly through its many shifts in place and time. The key moment is 1933 when Thomas Lamb, a successful businessman and quiet architect of rebellion, buys 157 acres of land belonging to the Lanyers, the family that enslaved his ancestors.

Distrustful, Lamb walks the property boundaries to ensure that they are mapped correctly in the paperwork. He does this in the knowledge that mapping a homeplace in African American culture is an act of skill as well as faith because Black southerners have often been disenfranchised and dispossessed of their land.

If there is a main protagonist of The Great Wherever among Sanders’s large cast of characters, it is Aubrey Lamb. She is an erratic young woman living a financially precarious life in contemporary Washington DC’s........

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