Dana Cann
Set in New York City and New Jersey on the cusp of the financial crisis, Ghosts of Bergen County is a literary mystery with supernatural elements. It is a tautly paced and intricately plotted
story in which collective burdens manifest into hauntings.
Gil and Mary Beth Ferko moved to Bergen County thinking they would lead a typical suburban life: Gil commuting daily to Manhattan; Mary Beth a stay-at-home mom. But after a hit-and-run accident kills their infant daughter, Mary Beth becomes a shut-in. When Gil reconnects with a high school classmate, Jen, she introduces him to heroin. As his dependency on the drug grows, his downward spiral puts his life in danger and his career in
jeopardy. Mary Beth has also found an escape—first in prescription drugs that numb her senses, then in the companionship of a mysterious girl who heightens them. And Jen is also haunted. Years ago she witnessed a man she had just met fall from a rooftop. She walked away from the accident and has been tormented since by the question of why she did so. As her quest to rectify that mistake collides with other mysteries and traumas, all the characters must face the fine line between fate and happenstance.
About Ghosts of Bergen County
"Cann’s novel is an impressive, accomplished effort, nuanced in its depiction of complex interpersonal drama and eerie elements of the supernatural."
"Ghosts of Bergen County is a beautiful, trenchant book. Dana Cann's characters are so complicated and vulnerable, so profoundly human and wounded, that they linger in the reader's memory like family snapshots. This is a courageous and revelatory novel, the beginning of a gifted writer's long career."
Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This
"Dana Cann picks up where John Cheever left off, riding the commuter rail from suburb to city with hotshot investment bankers and commodities traders, exhuming not-so-shiny lives of heroin, ghosts, and grief. I felt haunted by Ghosts of Bergen County while reading it, and still do."
Dan Pope, author of Housebreaking
"Elegantly written and sharply observed, Ghosts of Bergen County is both riveting and moving, a story about the love and longing that hold us together, as our ghosts conspire to tear us apart."
Kimberly McCreight, New York Times best-selling author of
Reconstructing Amelia and Where They Found Her
Praise for Ghosts of Bergen County