THE GREAT WHEREVER

A hapless woman reconnects with her family in this debut novel.

Aubrey Lamb is having a hard time. Aside from the fact that she’s something of a bad-decision machine, the 32-year-old Washington, D.C., woman has been dogged by a string of bad luck: On the very day she thought her longtime boyfriend was going to propose, she first lost her wallet, cutting off access to her meager funds, and then said boyfriend dumped her. Then her luck changes: When she gets to one of her three jobs, she finds an email from a relative she’s never heard of telling her there’s an offer to buy the Tennessee farm that was part of her inheritance from her father—Aubrey owns a share of the land along with three cousins, which she vaguely knew about but hadn’t given any thought to since her father’s recent death. Considering that she’s in desperate financial straits, she agrees to travel down to Tennessee to discuss the offer. Watching over all of this is the narrator, unnamed until late in the book, a late relative who lives in the titular land, an afterlife populated by Lamb family members who were in line to inherit the property but died before they could: “Without even trying, we see what happens here, overhear all sorts of conversations, from banal to explosive. Better than the best reality TV.” The narrator intersperses Aubrey’s story with the history of the farm and the Lamb family, a long line of Black Tennesseans who endured racism over the course of the 20th century. Sanders plots the story so intricately and powerfully that it’s hard to believe this is a first novel, following the 2023 story collection Company; it has a sprawling cast of characters, and the author has obviously put real care into crafting each one. She imbues the book with imagination and wit, and the narrator’s voice, cheeky and charming, is perfectly rendered. This is a truly magnificent novel from a uniquely powerful voice.

A bighearted triumph.