The Ghost Mom's Guide to the Afterlife

A helicopter mom comes back as a ghost to over-parent her children and sabotage the new live-in nanny in this tender, mordantly funny debut novel.

Tess has made a career of writing parenting books–most recently a defense of helicopter moms that got her laughed off the internet. But when Tess dies in a freak accident, swept away by a rogue wave, she can’t bear to leave her daughters behind. Instead, Tess remains on earth as a ghost, determined to protect her family—and to write a parenting guide for other ghost moms.

Together with a spectral support group that includes an over-sharing succubus, a hollow-eyed water wraith, and a chain-smoking ghost nun sponsor, Tess learns the rules of haunting (writing in bathroom mirror steam: Easy! Possessing the living: Hard!) and hones her ghostly powers. But when her husband hires a new babysitter, a pretty twenty-something named Rosie with dangerous secrets of her own, Tess must move heaven and earth to save her family.

An uproarious comedy that bursts with tenderness and yearning, The Ghost Mom’s Guide to the Afterlife is a triumphant tale of love, death, and the everlasting bonds of motherhood.

“Kathleen Founds is a luminous, bright, subversive and very funny writer. What I especially love about her work is the sense that her strange and wonderful talent is always working in the service of a deeply humane and hopeful vision of the world.”
—George Saunders, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

“I could not love this book more. It is wonderful at every level. So original, so funny, so sad. What I mainly want to say here is—wow!”
—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“This manual for ghost moms is both a wild and hilarious tale of maternal over-involvement and a deeply intelligent and humane investigation of what it means to be a mother in a patriarchal world. Kathleen Founds is a phenomenally original writer, and this is her most exciting work yet.”
—Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist

“This novel blew me away. It’s outrageously original, fabulously written, witty, mordant, heartrending, and everything in between. There’s no doubt about it: Kathleen Founds’ Ghost Mom’s Guide to the Afterlife is a masterpiece.”
—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

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