Our 10 Favorite Literary Ghost Stories
Are you the type to shut yourself in with a good book on Halloween night? These 10 books are as spine-chilling for their terrific prose as they are for their supernatural storytelling, from a Booker Prize winner set in Civil War purgatory to a queer Gothic dreamworld that won last year's National Book Award. Get in the spooky spirit this season in the company of these literary ghosts that haunted critics.

A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories
Mariana EnriquezThe Argentine author of the surrealist story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, returns with another “masterful collection full of grotesque body horror, red-hot terror, and mysterious events, revealing the pain and loss endured by women in modern-day Buenos Aires,” according to Publishers Weekly.


Hardcover, 2024
$28.00$14.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Blackouts
Justin TorresThis 2023 National Book Award winner for fiction fuses fiction and true history to shine a spotlight on the forgotten queer lives of a bygone era. In the Star Tribune, Hamilton Cain praised it as, "a transfixing collage of gorgeous prose and manipulated illustrations, with themes of cultural erasure and the effervescence of lust and love.”
Paperback, 2024
$20.00$10.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Model Home
Rivers SolomonIn the Lambda Award winner’s latest supernatural thriller, three Black siblings return to the white Dallas suburb where they grew up in the aftermath of their parents' unusual deaths. “In evocative prose, Solomon harnesses and recasts classic horror tropes to tell an original story of race and class, family, trauma, and grief,” observed Kirkus in its starred review. “With this exhilarating and unforgettable work, Solomon proves to be a formidable writer."

Hardcover, 2024
$28.00$14.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Shehan KarunatilakaIn Sri Lanka, a dead photographer tries to solve his own shocking murder in this 2022 Booker Prize winner that the judging committee called "a rollercoaster journey through life and death.”


Paperback, 2022
$18.95$9.48 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Sentence
Louise ErdrichA small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted by the store's most annoying customer in the latest by a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author. It’s a unique ghost story that wades into themes of incarceration, grief, justice and protest during one of the most turbulent years in the city’s history.


Paperback, 2022
$19.99$9.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
Lorrie MooreThe first novel in over a decade from the Birds of America author is a time-hopping ghost story told through the eyes of a teacher visiting his dying brother, a therapy clown and an assassin. It’s a tragicomic tale that’s peppered with the author’s unmistakable banter and unpredictable twists.


Hardcover, 2023
$27.00$13.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Luminaries
Eleanor CattonNew Zealand’s 1860s gold rush is the backdrop of this ghostly Booker Prize-winning mystery structured around the twelve signs of the Zodiac.


Paperback, 2014
$21.99$10.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)
Yu MiriWinner of the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature, this inventive novel combines historical fiction and personal narratives with the supernatural to deliver a haunting story of a homeless ghost in Tokyo's bustling train station.


Paperback, 2021
$18.00$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Lincoln in the Bardo
George SaundersThe celebrated author won the 2017 Booker Prize for this imaginative Civil War story that finds Abraham Lincoln mourning the death of his young son Willie, who inhabits a Buddhist purgatory state filled with quarrelsome ghosts.


Paperback, 2018
$18.00$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Apology
Jimin HanA 105-year-old South Korean matriarch is thrust into the afterlife to ward off a family curse in this ghostly generational saga that looks back at the Japanese occupation of Korea.


Hardcover, 2023
$28.00$14.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book