tea for ghosts
Chris Vuklisevic
(Editions Denoël, 448 pages, 2023)
**pre-empted in italy,the netherlands and Denmark***
***Sold to Germany, Russia and Spain***
Are you ready to get carried away in a world full of ghosts, magic teas, and unresolved family secrets?
Tea for Ghosts will embark you on Felicity and Agony’s quest to find their mother’s ghost, from Nice to the desert of Almería in Spain, and from the Valley of Wonders to abandoned villages in Provence.
Carmine’s mysterious death brings the sisters back together after three decades. They parted during their teenage years and have had no contact since.
Felicity, who helps ghosts move from one world to the next, left for high school where she mastered her power and discovered how teas could help her unlock ghosts’ memories. Agony, who also displays supernatural abilities and progressively turns into a witch, left abruptly for Italy to escape her mother’s contempt, and never came back.
Even though they both want to find their mother, they have different motives. While growing up, Carmine deliberately ignored Agony and disproportionally favored Felicity, who spared no effort to keep up with the expectations of them both. Agony never understood why her mother had so much disdain for her and yearns for an answer. Felicity, who has over the years kept relatively strong ties with Carmine, is caught by surprise by her sudden and unexplained death.
In their endeavor to find Carmine’s ghost, Felicity and Agony end up cooperating, but not without difficulty. They help each other gather clues, documentation, and places to find their mother, but their quest is punctuated by multiple tensions and heart-to-heart conversations.
The two women retrace Carmine’s past and find out that the mother they knew had several lives. Even more disturbing, those who bear witness to her life paint a strange and even contradictory portrait of Carmine. Each encounter helps the sisters to move closer to the truth.
Chris Vuklisevic successfully combines magical realism, fairy tales, and fantasy to offer readers an enthralling and touching novel in which two sisters attempt to make peace with the ghosts of their past. She has a knack for depicting the complexity of family ties and intergenerational trauma. This captivating one-of-a-kind story, reminiscent of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, will hold you spellbound.
Chris Vuklisevic was born in 1992, and currently lives in Ireland. Tea for Ghosts is her second novel. Her first novel, Derniers jours d’un monde oublié, published in 2021, won Gallimard’s Folio SF contest.