For 30 Years, He Assumed the Identity of His Dead Friend. Now He’s Coming Clean.

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THESE GHOSTS ARE FAMILY By Maisy Card As family secrets go, Stanford Solomon’s is a whopper. “I was born Abel Paisley,” the dying 69-year-old confesses to his daughters in 2005. Having emigrated from Jamaica to London more than three decades earlier, Abel and his childhood friend — the original Stanford — find jobs as the two “chosen wogs” in an all-white ship crew.

When the real Stanford is killed by falling cargo, and their crewmates confuse him for “the other black guy,” Abel seizes the opportunity to fake his own death, assume Stanford’s identity (they “actually did look alike”) and begin a new life in America, away from his unhappy marriage and young children back in Kingston. A more linear family saga might simply explore the impact of Abel’s lie on future generations. But “These Ghosts Are Family,” Maisy Card’s rich, ambitious debut novel, zigzags back and forth in time, between Abel’s relatives in Harlem, Jamaica, Brooklyn and Newark. While his actions affect a daughter, Irene, who grows up without her father, they also preverberate, so to speak, for his great-grandmother Louise, a white-passing child in colonial Jamaica who learns her mother was a slave.

Instances of false or fuzzy parentage recur up and down the bloodline, stirring questions of identity and origin that have haunted fictional characters from “The Winter’s Tale” to “Billie Jean. ” Each character gives Card a fresh opportunity to play with form: Chapters shapeshift here into historical fiction, there into folklore. Collective and second-person narrators feature alongside 19th-century diary entries and court documents recreating Warm Manor, the sugar plantation where Florence, Abel’s great-great-grandmother, is brutally enslaved. Card deftly grounds these experiments in subtle details that reveal history’s imprint on everyday family life.

Like Abel’s freckles, light skin and red hair, which show up in his children and “meant that somewhere in his tree, someone was white,” so too do legacies of racism, colonialism and misogyny emerge in moments as casual as a domestic joke: When Vincent, Abel’s son, marries a white woman descended from slaveowners, he quips that “maybe God had brought them together so he could avenge his ancestors by getting close enough to wring Debbie’s neck. ” Card’s multiple voices, constant narrative reinvention and vast timeline do come at a cost, though, and the book stumbles in some of the later chapters that lack the vitality of its first half. Amid this massive ensemble cast, the experiences of Abel/Stanford’s younger progeny — his extramarital child, Ruthie, the heroin-addicted Estelle and her daughter, Caren — are drowned out, never quite coming alive. Occasionally, the novel’s sheer breadth takes a toll on the prose, flattening complex emotions in particular into cliché.