Seeing Ghosts

For readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander, an intimate and haunting portrait of grief and the search for meaning from a singular new talent as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family.Born two years after the only son in her family died just hours after his birth, Kat Chow became unusually fixated with death. She worried constantly about her parents dying-especially her mother, a vivacious and mischievous woman. One morning when Kat was nine, her mother casually made a morbid joke: When she eventually dies, she says laughing, she'd like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat's future apartment in order to always watch over her. Four years later when her mother died unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her two older sisters and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together what is part ghost story and part excavation of her family's...