Excerpt from Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Hey," I said when I answered. I wanted to blurt out the words guess what, the strangest thing ... but she was in a hurry and interrupted me.

"I need you to come by the office."

"What, right now?" I said.

"There's something we need to talk about."

I'd become inured to these occasional summonses: fools' errands to check her back door or make sure she'd turned the oven off. In lieu of me having a proper job my time was considered fluid, each task a pointed reminder of my own alarmless existence. In spite of this, her urgency threw me. And why the need to go to her office?

"As soon as you can," she said.

I glanced down at the letter again, my hand sliding against the receiver. The reason was obvious, wasn't it? She must have got one too.


By the time I emerged from the tube at Camden, I'd talked my panic into a kind of relief. Maya would sort it all out. She'd probably called the number already, solicitor to solicitor and all that. It's what she'd trained for, wasn't it—First at Oxford, imminent partnership—at least until that last year when she'd decided to give it all up to play happy families in her husband's business.

Maya's worse half, Ed, was some shit-hot world-class architect. He was also about a hundred and three. I always knew she would land on her feet with someone super-rich and super-successful but she'd made a Faustian bargain on that one.

Their office was in one of those mews houses, meddled to fuck in the eighties with glass bricks and windows for doors. I never understood it myself, all that interfering with social history for a genteel tantrum in the guise of progressiveness.

They'd got some new mousy-haired Sloane in reception. "Mrs. Redgrave's with a client?" she said, practically cross-eyed from looking down her nose at me. She'd already assessed me as someone unimportant, and without the steer of prior knowledge no one ever guessed we were sisters. Petty in my annoyance, I slid against the fiberglass sofa and flicked through Architectural Digest, making little cracks of thunder with the pages.


Even in her office, Maya kept me waiting, marooned behind the hull of her desk as she wrote in her man-sized diary, her center parting as neat as an airstrip. "Dyed your hair?" I said.

She frowned but kept her eyes on the page. "Can you not be weird for five minutes?"

I squinted. It was definitely blonder. "Not trying to hurry you," I said, "but I've got somewhere to be at two."

"Where?" It was a miracle she didn't give herself whiplash.

"Hot date with Robert De Niro."

"So you are still seeing Dr. Fenton?"

She placed a tick in the page's margin with a furious flourish of responsibility. "You do realize it's meant to be tricky, Lils? If therapy was easy, it wouldn't be worth it."

I rested my arms on the desk, the letter crackling its disapproval in my pocket. "Go on, then. Spill," I said.

She pressed her temples. "Something weirdly awkward has come up."

In the matter of Miss Mei-Hua Chen ...

"Ed's planning me a secret party."

"What?"

"I know. It's horrendous. I hate it."

"Sorry, no, I meant what are you on about?"

"He's been threatening to do it for months, cozying me up with all his associates. Says it makes sense to keep me in the 'network.'"

"Hostage network?"

"Funny."

But it wasn't, was it? This couldn't be the reason she'd called me here. She was warming up to it, easing me in. "And I'm to do what, exactly?"

"I need you to talk to him, Lily. Pretend that his assistant let it slip and you want to plan it yourself because you know me, blah blah blah ... At least then I can control the invites."

"Right."

"Don't panic, I've done it. It's done. Food and guests and everything, so it's not exactly lying." She flicked me with a petulant gaze. "That won't be a problem, will it?"

Excerpted from Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton. Copyright © 2023 by Wiz Wharton. Excerpted by permission of HarperVia. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.