From an award-winning writer, a debut novel that’s a fresh and dazzling portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction through the present day

At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling into adulthood. A semi-employed gig worker in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the recent loss of her father and the end of a relationship that she’d thought would lead to marriage. When Aubrey learns that she has inherited a shared stake in a sizable Tennessee farm from her father, she simply sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and the potential to erase a mounting pile of debts.

Upon her arrival in Lanyer County, though, Aubrey meets the relatives with whom she shares ownership of the farm, and discovers the backstory of the land, beginning with her great-grandfather Thomas—one of the first Black landowners in his community, who gave his four children a homestead on which they could flourish.

But the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it divides the family, turning Thomas’ descendants against each other and drawing the attention of external forces only too eager to wrest the land from Black hands. These struggles come to a head when a catastrophic tragedy befalls the Lambs, splintering the family and echoing down through the decades, with repercussions for Audrey herself.

As Aubrey learns this history from her living relatives, the ghosts of her ancestors interject with their own exasperated, gossipy commentary on the flaws and foibles of relatives living and dead, and stake their own claims on the farm.

Injecting the expansive family sagas of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton with a very modern voice, The Great Wherever is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our family, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us.

I received an advance copy of the audiobook of this title courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

I really enjoyed this book, and a lot of that comes down to who the author chose to narrate this book. Rather than being told from third-person or even from the POV of the main character, the story is narrated by one of Aubrey’s dead ancestors, and that decision really elevated this one for me. It gave such an interesting perspective.

Aubrey Lamb is thirty two and feels like all she does Is make bad life choices. She’s a gig worked in D.C., not making much money and the guy she thought was going to propose to her just dumped her. Also, her father recently died and she’s drowning in debt. Then she finds out she’s inherited a partial stake in a big farm down in Tennessee from her dad, and suddenly she feels like maybe there’s a financial silver lining ahead. She heads south to meet relatives she barely knows and figure out whether to sell her share of the land. Once she arrives, she gets pulled into a tangle of family history and present day drama with her cousins, who each hold their own piece of the farm and don’t agree on what to do with it. Some want to sell to developers who are circling like vultures. Others want to hold onto it just for the family legacy. Underneath all of that is the deeper story of how the family got the land in the first place, going all the way back to Aubrey’s great grandfather Thomas, who became one of the first Black landowners in the area after Reconstruction. What he built as a foundation for his children turned into something much heavier over the generations, weighed down by outside pressure, family infighting, and one tragedy that split the family apart for good.

Watching over the land are four ancestor ghosts who live on the farm in what they call the great wherever. The four are led by the unnamed narrator, who died young. Her voice is sharp and snarky in exactly the right way, and I loved how much personality she and the other ghosts bring to the table. They gossip about the living relatives, they judge everyone’s financial and romantic choices without mercy, and they’re terrified the farm might get sold off to strangers, which would mean losing their own connection to the place. It made the family history feel relevant and present rather than just backstory.

The pacing of the book also worked really well for me. Bouncing between the present day family conflict and the deeper history of the land kept things moving, and I never felt like either timeline dragged or got too in the weeds with unnecessary filler.

This is ultimately a book about family and legacy, and what people owe the ones who came before them versus what they need for themselves right now. It handles grief, land, race, and inheritance with a lot of care, but it never loses its sense of humor either. The living family members and the dead ones are both treated with wit and empathy, and I really grew to care about them.

I did an immersive read on this one, and Keylor Leigh’s narration was spot on. Her voice matched exactly what I’d imagined the narrator sounding like in my head, and she handled the full cast of characters well, especially the kids, who can be tough to voice convincingly.

If you love multigenerational family sagas with plenty of emotional depth and a little supernatural flair mixed in, this one is worth adding to your list. I loved the story and the characters, and I especially loved the narrative choice the author made.

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