Ghost Towns West

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A long-abandoned silver mine for sale sounded like an adventure too great to pass up, but it turned into much more—a calling, a community of millions, and hard-earned lessons about chasing impractical dreams. “Inspiring and meditative—the story of man vs...

The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns - from the camps of California's forty-niners to the 20th-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising. We who have seen too many Western movies sometimes think that the legends of the Wild West were invented by scriptwriters - but the ghost towns remain.

Jeff Young takes us on a journey through haunted places of memory and loss, summoning the ghosts of loved ones and long-departed heroes who somehow still occupy the disappearing nooks and ruins of the city. Walking through the last remnants of the places he remembers from his childhood, walking through grief, we are accompanied by a Liverpool of revenants, where Malcolm Lowry drinks in derelict saloons, Thomas De Quincey still roams the Everton hills and Bob Dylan sits in a doorway on Dublin Street.

Keith Chen, the second son of a traditional Taiwanese family of seven, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man. The novel begins a decade later, when Chen has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family's village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there. As the story unfurls, we learn what tore this family apart and, more importantly, the truth behind the murder of Chen's boyfriend.

Willow was like any other teenage girl until a fatal car accident left her an orphan with the ability to see ghosts. Relocating to live with her grandparents, she hoped to lay low to survive the rest of high school and maybe figure out the whole "seeing the dead" thing. But with ghosts popping up in the middle of class, Willow was struggling to keep the gossip at bay. No one thinks you're normal when you get caught having a one-sided conversation alone.

Local matchmaker and PI Demeter West gets called in to investigate some interdimensional turbulence in the basement of the local library. Over the course of the investigation, Demeter learns some new approaches to tarot work, some local history, some new information about Casper's situation within the multiverse, and some things she didn't know about her husband and daughter.