{ "item_title" : "The Great Wherever (Reese's Book Club)", "item_author" : [" Shannon Sanders "], "item_description" : "REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • BOOK OF THE MONTH PICK • Named a Most Anticipated book by NPR, People, Oprah Daily, Esquire, and more“A wonderful novel about family and tradition, perfect for the holidays.” —Reese WitherspoonAn impulsive and heartbroken woman inherits her father’s share of a Tennessee farm that is rich in family secrets and occupied with busybody ghosts in this sweeping family portrait. The dead are relentless gossips, or at least these dead are.At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling through adulthood. Underpaid and working multiple jobs in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the end of a serious relationship and the recent loss of her father. When Aubrey learns she has inherited his stake in a sizable Tennessee farm she sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and to erase a mounting pile of debt. Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts—Aubrey’s ancestors, who’ve staked their own claims to the farm and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the mistakes made by the living, be they romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey’s great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hopes to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it turns the Lambs against one another, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes through the decades. Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future. An expansive family saga told with a wry and distinctly modern voice, The Great Wherever is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our families, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us. Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was named one of the best books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly and Debutiful, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including One Story, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature, and has received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons. REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • BOOK OF THE MONTH PICK“A wonderful novel about family and tradition, perfect for the holidays.”—Reese WitherspoonNamed a Most Anticipated Book of Summer 2026 by NPR, People, Oprah Daily, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country, Esquire, The New York Post, The Boston Globe, WGBH, Real Simple, The Root, Publishers Weekly, and more“Delicious. . . Our ghost-narrator hashes out the tale with an endearing mix of tenderness and resentment. . . . Woven through this story are enough characters and plotlines to fill several more novels, but Sanders handles the abundance of material with restraint. . . . Sanders’s narrative shifts gorgeously through time and place to reveal all that’s been passed down through generations of Lambs.”—The New York Times“Expectations were running high for Shannon Sanders' first novel. . . . A playful and poignant intergenerational saga about a haunted farm in which ancestors watch over and critique the living for posterity and entertainment, The Great Wherever leaps over that bar. . . . Inventive and new . . . I was hooked from the first sentence.”—NPR, 15 Most Anticipated Books of Summer“A gripping saga of Black legacy.”—People, Must-Read Books for Summer 2026“Wonderfully satisfying . . . [The] voice is one of the more winning I’ve encountered in any novel of the past decade.”—The Boston Globe“A refreshing twist on a ghost story that takes a woman back to her ancestral home as she searches for meaning and identity in the wake of loss.”—Reese’s Book Club“Simply put, this book is a pleasure and a treasure. Witty and wise, intelligent and engaging, heartbreaking and heartmending. Shannon Sanders is a writer to keep your eye on.”—Tayari Jones“The Great Wherever is an epic and deeply human story of family and fortune that reaches across the divide between the living and the dead with grace, humor, and emotional conviction. Shannon Sanders’s love for her characters is matched only by her ability to make us care about them as much as she does. I’m in awe of what she accomplishes in this astoundingly good debut novel.”—Patrick Ryan, New York Times bestselling author of Buckeye“If you like a little moral complexity along with your entertainment, I recommend Shannon Sanders' rich, Black, generational epic The Great Wherever. . . . Fans of The Love Songs of W.E.B DuBois, this one's for you.”—WYPR“Sanders’s debut novel sings, joining a choir of voices alongside Toni Morrison and August Wilson in conjuring memory with contemporary urgency.”—The Brooklyn Rail“This is a truly magnificent novel from a uniquely powerful voice. A bighearted triumph.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A gripping multigenerational epic of land, home, and inheritance . . . Sanders poses timely questions of ownership and ancestry, and she packs the novel with indelible imagery. . . .This resonates.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Powerful . . . I ate up this debut. ”—Modern Mrs. Darcy“A debut novel that is part family saga, part historical fiction, part ghost story, and entirely captivating . . . Sanders expertly portrays familial relationships, imbuing her characters with pathos and humor as they grapple with the complexities of family legacy.”—Booklist“Sanders is a sublime writer with unparalleled talent. I could read her writing all day, every day.”—Debutiful, The Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2026“A brilliant creation—funny and chaotic.”—Good Housekeeping (UK) “Sanders writes with pace and emotion, tackling a multigenerational story rooted in the American South. Oh, and the afterlife has a starring role.”—Elle (UK) “Sanders has created something remarkable here, that feels haunting, hopeful, funny, sad and longing all at the same time.”—Red“The Great Wherever is fertile ground for Shannon Sanders’s vast gifts as a writer. Dead or alive, righteous or wrong, every one of her Lambs is a singular, beautiful mess, together growing the rich family history she seeds, from page one, with great care, heart, and unyielding humor. By the novel’s end, I felt as dazzled as one of the ancestors at the edge of the pond, in awe of all its beauty and magic.”—Dawnie Walton, author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev“In The Great Wherever, Sanders masterfully bridges generations and yet is still able to home in on her characters' intricate inner lives. By the end, they all feel like family, and reading their story feels like coming home. Gripping, moving, witty, and wise, this is historical fiction at its finest.”—Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of On the Rooftop, a Reese’s Book Club pick“What unfolds in The Great Wherever is not a single story but a gathering of them—voices overlapping, correcting, and remembering differently. Shannon Sanders allows those differences to stand, creating a narrative that feels layered, unsettled, and true to the way families actually move through time — together, but not always in agreement. Sanders writes the Lamb family with enormous care and irresistible vitality; even their ghosts carry vanity, heartbreak, and humor. An utterly transporting debut.”—Essie Chambers, bestselling author of Swift River“The Great Wherever is an arch yet heartwarming tale of family, the ghosts that haunt them, and the place we call home. Between the story's heartbreaks, we get leaps of humor that made me love every member of the Lamb family, the ones dead and the ones alive. It is rare to root for every character and yet I found myself doing so. What a gift of a book.”—Vanessa Chan, internationally bestselling author of The Storm We Made", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/25/042/167/1250421675_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.99", "online_price" : "26.39", "our_price" : "26.39", "club_price" : "26.39", "savings_pct" : "12", "savings_amt" : "3.60", "club_savings_pct" : "12", "club_savings_amt" : "3.60", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "29.99" } }

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Shannon Sanders’ first novel, The Great Wherever, is an ingenious meditation on inheritances material, spiritual and emotional, and a worthy successor to her much-lauded short story collection, Company. Aubrey Lamb has long felt like the underdog in her own story, the problematic black sheep of a successful Black family. A year after her father’s death, while her older sister Bellamy now occupies their childhood home with her dutiful husband and adorable children, Aubrey is flailing. At 32, she’s juggling full- and part-time jobs (senior legal document technician, yoga teacher, SAT tutor) and plagued by “overtly symbolic” anxiety dreams about her dwindling chances at motherhood. Then, one rainy night, the status quo takes a turn for the worse as Aubrey is dumped by her boyfriend of four years in the most pitying, deflating manner at her favorite restaurant. It's at this ebb that Aubrey finally turns her attention to the most recent of her relatives’ entreaties regarding 145 acres of Tennessee farmland that has been in the family for a century and which she now owns a third of, having inherited her father Micah’s share when he passed. There is an offer on the table to turn the family legacy into cash by selling to developers. Despite the lure of a payout, the land holds sentimental value, and her relatives have rebuffed every previous enticement. Aubrey feels none of their connection (she had forgotten the name of the county, Lanyers, when it popped up in her inbox), but she decides to accompany her cousin to see the property in person. That mercenary journey turns into one of discovery and revelation about herself and her family history. Meanwhile, chatty, unsettled ghosts occupy the farm and sit in judgment on their descendants' choices. The promise of this intriguing premise is elevated by Sanders’ writing. The wit and wisdom of Aubrey’s relatives, living and undead, is unmatched. What the deceased lack in flesh and blood, they make up for in attitude. These ghosts relish the vicarious thrill of experiencing life through those they watch over, believing their afterlife “has one great advantage over earthside society: it feeds our nosiness generously. Here, we aren’t restricted by geography or the walls of our own memories—even those of us who in life never boarded a plane, never even left western Tennessee, have nonetheless by now gotten to experience in-season swordfish Meuniere at the Baltimore Oceanaire by way of a living cousin.” For a book about legacies and the afterlife, The Great Wherever is surprisingly and charmingly life-affirming.

Read our interview with Shannon Sanders about The Great Wherever.