Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne

The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne

The Ghost at the Table

by Suzanne Berne

  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Oct 2006, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

Thanksgiving, homecoming, reunion - family ideals shared across generations and geography. But does reality ever live up to expectations? The Fiske family is gathered for a classically disjointed Thanksgiving, driven by old jealousies, dangerous misconceptions, and grudging love - the worst kind. The family table groans with the weight of guilt and blame. The result is a taut story of a twenty-first-century family’s unraveling, played against a famous nineteenth-century writer’s own family dysfunction.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Berne takes an inherently dramatic conflict - one sister's intention to obfuscate the hard truths of the past vs. another's determination to drag them under a spotlight —and ratchets up the stakes with astute observation and narrative cunning." - PW starred review.

"This substantial tale of a dysfunctional family reunion promises a holiday, and a read, to remember." - Kirkus.

This information about The Ghost at the Table was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Julie

An eternal subject written well
Since the beginning of Adam and Eve a family is the core of most stories. This one may not go down in history, but it is a very good read.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Suzanne Berne Author Biography

Photo: Avery Kimmell

Suzanne Berne is the author of the novels The Dogs of Littlefield, A Crime in the Neighborhood, A Perfect Arrangement, and The Ghost at the Table, as well as Missing Lucile: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew, part biography and part memoir. She has taught at Harvard University as a Briggs-Copeland Fellow and at Wellesley College. Currently she teaches creative writing at Boston College and lives outside of Boston with her husband, Kenneth Kimmell, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and their two daughters.

Link to Suzanne Berne's Website

Other books by Suzanne Berne at BookBrowse
  • The Dogs of Littlefield jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Anagrams

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.