House of Yesterday by Deeba Zargarpur
This debut is a compelling family drama about generational trauma and secrets in a large family of Afghan-Uzbeki immigrants. As Sara deals with the impending divorce of her parents and the slow painful loss of her grandmother to dementia, she begins to see ghostly apparitions in a home her family’s construction company is renovating. Sara gets pulled into a web of family secrets and realizes that even though her family has a strong storytelling tradition, the stories she’s been told her whole life aren’t the whole story. At times creepy, but ultimately redemptive, this story is all about confronting literal and figurative ghosts.
House of Yesterday by Deeba Zargarpur (List Price: $18.99, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 9780374388706, November 2022)
Reviewed by Melissa Taylor, E. Shaver bookseller in Savannah, Georgia