By the time Francis arrives, the haint is gone and Francis tells Charles that haints don’t exist in Detroit. He is saved by Francey, the oldest daughter, who rescues him from the room before the ghost can kill him. Fourteen-year-old Charles has just moved into a small room that he hoped would give him some space from his siblings at night. However, in 1958, life take a sinister turn when their oldest son Charles encounters a ghost, also called a “haint,” that tries to drag him out the window. This surprisingly large house-larger than Francis and Viola had ever seen in the South-gives them hope for the future.

The Turner House begins in the 1920s with the story of Francis and Viola Turner, former sharecroppers who worked their way out of poverty and moved from Arkansas to Detroit where they eventually raise a family of thirteen children in a house on Yarrow Street. Flournoy also won the 2016 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was highly acclaimed financial success and was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction. Both critics and Flournoy herself have compared this book the work of Zora Neale Hurston, as it explores themes of family ties, race, poverty, addiction, and hauntings both real and imagined. Although Flournoy has family from Detroit, she did not live in the city personally and so conducted extensive research. The house they live in becomes a character in the story and serves as an anchor for this large African-American family. Focusing on a Detroit family with thirteen children as it struggles to cope with the economic troubles, the narrative spans from the 1920s to the 1980s.

The Turner House is the debut novel of African-American author Angela Flournoy, first published in 2015.

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy