Maisy Card Books in Order

If you want to begin with her signature novel: These Ghosts Are Family
If you're drawn to Jamaican family stories: These Ghosts Are Family
If you like layered fiction about secrets and inheritance: These Ghosts Are Family

Maisy Card was born in Portmore, in Jamaica's St. Catherine parish, and moved to New York when she was five. She grew up in Queens, in and around Caribbean immigrant communities that would later shape the people, pressures, and family histories in her fiction.

She has described Richmond Hill, where her family first lived, as a place where West Indian life was everywhere, and that mattered. Later, going to school in Manhattan showed her a very different New York, one split by race, class, and access. That feeling, of living between worlds while knowing they touch, runs through much of her work.

Books got to her early.

As a child, she loved stories about outsiders and solitary kids. She has pointed to Julie of the Wolves, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and The Story of Ferdinand as early favorites, and she was drawn to characters who were complicated, isolated, or a little out of step. You can see that interest again in the people she writes now, characters who are rarely simple and almost never fully understood by the people around them.

Writing became the plan in tenth grade.

A high school assignment on Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" asked Card to rewrite the story from the point of view of a character who did not speak in the original. She has said she had never felt so invested in a school assignment before. From that point on, she wanted to be a writer.

At Wesleyan University, she studied English and American Studies. In college, she began to understand more clearly that if she wanted to see Caribbean people and families like hers at the center of a story, she might have to write them herself. She later earned an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College.

Her working life took a practical turn, but it still stayed close to stories.

After graduate school, Card worked in fundraising and development for nonprofits. In her early thirties, wanting more direct contact with people, she decided to become a librarian, earned an MLIS from Rutgers University, and built a career in public libraries across New Jersey. She has said library work taught her patience and reminded her that everyone walking through the door has a story, which feels like a good summary of her fiction too.

These Ghosts Are Family began as separate short stories around 2006 and took roughly twelve years to become a novel. Card has said the book grew out of questions about her own family, especially as her grandfather began showing signs of dementia and she started thinking about how much history disappears when people stay silent. Her research went deep, into Jamaican history, old newspapers, family records, and the long afterlife of slavery and colonialism.

She grew up hearing patois at home, even if she no longer spoke it fluently, and has said she could not imagine writing a book about Jamaican people without letting that language onto the page.

The finished novel follows the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem after Abel Paisley fakes his death and takes another man's identity. Readers tend to come to it for the sweep, but stay for the intimacy, the shifting voices, the uneasy family ties, and the way Card connects migration, colorism, violence, secrecy, and survival without losing sight of the people inside the history. The book won the American Book Award and the OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction, and it was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.

Outside the novel, her shorter work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, Guernica, and The New York Times. She has also taught fiction in graduate and conference settings. Card lives in Newark, New Jersey, and her second novel, Difficult Patrons, is announced for 2027. It fits a writer who pays attention to both history and everyday conversation.