Literary Fiction · Free kit
The Great Wherever
A year after her father's death, debt-burdened Aubrey Lamb inherits his stake in a Tennessee farm she has never seen. She meets cousins she barely knows while four ancestor ghosts — gossipy, sharp-eyed, and tied to the land — watch a sale of the farm loom. Shannon Sanders's debut novel moves from contemporary Washington, D.C., back through Thomas Lamb, one of the first Black landowners in his community, and a family tragedy that still decides who gets to stay.
“The dead are relentless gossips, or at least these dead are.”
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The Great Wherever Icebreakers
Answer in under 30 seconds. These connect to the book’s themes without spoiling the story.
Personality Reveal
1. Are you the sibling who would take the family house, or the one who would take the mysterious piece of land nobody has visited?
Personality Reveal
2. When official-looking email arrives about money or family, do you open it the same day or let it rot for a month?
Personality Reveal
3. Are you more likely to keep a messy family story going, or to sell the thing and take the cash before the next argument starts?
Funny & Light
4. What's the most unhinged thing a relative has ever said about your outfit, your job, or your love life — as if they had a front-row seat?
Funny & Light
5. What's one object in your house that a future historian would completely misread as a personality trait?
Funny & Light
6. What's the family recipe, porch habit, or leftover name you would defend even if you cannot cook, garden, or explain it?
Would You Rather
7. Would you rather inherit land you cannot afford to keep, or cash that would make your relatives never forgive you?
Would You Rather
8. Would you rather be the settled sibling with the house and the calendar, or the messy one everyone worries about and underestimates?
Would You Rather
9. Would you rather know your ancestors were watching every choice, or never know whether anyone from the past is still rooting for you?
Hot Take
10. Hot take: selling inherited land to pay your own bills is not a moral failure. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
11. Hot take: the sibling who got the "practical" inheritance still won. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
12. Finish this sentence: People hold onto family property too long because ______.
Personal Connection
13. What's one thing you inherited — a name, a debt, a story, a plot of something — that you did not ask for?
Personal Connection
14. Who in your family would still show up if you arrived broke, with a declined card, and needed a spare bed?
Personal Connection
15. When did you last visit a place your people come from — and did it feel like home, a museum, or someone else's house?