London, 2017. A long-dead man—nameless, all but formless, not quite here but unable to move on—fights his way across time back to who he was. What happened to him? And what happened to the love of his life? His memories retreat like the tide, tantalizingly close but always receding.

Trapped in a foreign world of electricity and isolation, this nameless ghost is harassed in the right direction by a fellow spirit, his sole companion in the realm of the living—a circus fortune teller tethered to him by a tragic history of her own. In an atmospheric, meditative form that gradually unfolds across the preceding centuries, The Hanged Man and the Fortune Teller unveils a layered and poignant mystery of family, lost love, and generational trauma. With insight and compassion, Lucy Banks gently but deftly probes the boundaries of memory, identity, and what it means to be human.

A melancholy meditation on love, grief, and mortality in the tradition of Shirley Jackson, The Hanged Man and the Fortune Teller is a testament to the longing that comes over us in our lonely moments, when we shiver and feel the presence of someone near us in the dark.