“Amy Wallen’s beautiful memoir, replete with fantastic stories, will carry you across continents and introduce you to amazing characters. With wit and poignant honesty, she recounts the details of her unlikely, unforgettable childhood and brings to life the era that shaped our present.”—Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children

“In this bold, original, and exquisitely written memoir, Wallen explores the reliability of haunting memories that include ‘play days’ when her Nigerian grade school is closed due to public executions and a family outing that involves robbing an ancient Peruvian grave. . . . Along the way, Wallen lays bare her family’s foibles with tender fearlessness. Although often about death, this memoir is full of life and life’s oppositions, both the light and the dark, which the author ultimately learns to embrace and celebrate.”—Sue William Silverman, author of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew

“The loneliness of childhood, fears of abandonment, and early sorrows, but also its magical escapes and restorations are captivatingly rendered in this haunting, exquisitely written memoir. Skulls, executions, bloated corpses, Siamese twins, and Godzilla movies manifest themselves uncannily, but also Santa Claus, an adored brother, a loving nanny, a beautiful mother, and an understanding if peripatetic father, making for a perfect balance of dark and light forces in this memory palace.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait inside My Head and Against Joie de Vivre

“A worldly gazetteer of haunted family stories. There’s sadness, mortality, tragedy, love, frenzy, tremendous restlessness, grave robbing, family secrets. Really, I’ve never read a memoir as uncannily provocative as this one! It’s as if the spectral world has finally found a home in the incidents found on every page. Amy Wallen has what Virginia Woolf called ‘a Gothic memory.’”—Howard Norman, author of My Darling Detective