Praise for The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and other Essential Ghosts

Soraya Palmer published her debut novel, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, a week before her former professor, Matthew Vollmer, published his sixth book, and first book-length essay: All of Us Together in the End. Both books, as the above title asserts, are about ghosts. To be more specific, they are also about mothers. Even more specifically: mothers who die before their time. And what happens next to everyone they love.

Matthew Vollmer, The Brooklyn Rail

The Brooklyn Book Festival is a nine-day event.

Roger Clark Brooklyn, Spectrum News NY1

I thought about stories that saved me as a child by showing me what was possible. And then I thought about the stories that were missing.

Soraya Palmer interviewed by The Rumpus, The Rumpus

Read an excerpt of “The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts” by Soraya Palmer, who was recently featured on the Brooklyn Book Festival‘s “Who? New!” panel.

Soraya Palmer, All Arts: PBS

Becoming a novelist was always on the cards for Soraya Palmer. Taking the reins fate afforded, the creative ditched her nine-to-five as a social worker after her fictional novel The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts enjoy

Omar Tomlinson, Loop News

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Like the West African folktales upon which the family relies, the novel highlights the power of story and myth to engage, teach, and soothe—and the enduring power of West African folklore in the diaspora.

Donna Hemans, Oprah Daily

What happens to stories that are born of another land? When they migrate multiple times and across multiple generations? Soraya Palmer’s ambitious and passionate debut, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, is a thoughtful exploration of these questions . . . This is a book written with the gods of storytelling in mind; it highlights what stories can do—that it’s not just the stories that evolve with each telling, but we ourselves who are rearranged too.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras, The New York Times Book Review

[A] stunning debut novel . . . With magnetic prose and nuanced characters, Palmer has created a story where readers will be invested from page one.

Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

The long and winding name of this assertive debut matches the magnitude of the stories within, which draw on folklore to capture the dynamic between two sisters, Zora and Sasha Porter. Their mother’s illness and their father’s violence has fractured their relationship, but their bond is reforged as an old family secret—and a surrounding cache of remarkable tales—roars to the surface.

Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

In wild, firecracker prose, Palmer whirls the reader into a realm where the real and unreal are constantly changing places. It’s a stunning feat of storytelling in itself.

Suzi Feay, Financial Times