‘Alice Sees Ghosts’ by Daisy Rockwell: A compulsive read about deviant women and fractured families

Over the years, readers have read Daisy Rockwell as a translator of Hindi and Urdu. They have heard her champion the art and political necessity of translated literature. And now, we have the 2022-International Booker Prize-winning translator return as a novelist – her debut novel, Taste, was published in 2014 – with Alice Sees Ghosts. Strange, mercurial, yet heartening, this novel establishes Rockwell as a chronicler of stories and ideas through ghosts, spirits and pasts.

Listening to voices

It begins with Alice finding herself unable to talk like others do. She feels she hears more than she should and hence speaks by writing. At her ancestral home, she shuffles between her bedridden grandmother, Nanette and her alcoholic mother, Clare. Both seem to sap from Alice the joys of truly being alive. When Alice isn’t deflecting her fiancé, Ronit’s attempts at a marriage proposal, she mostly reads and listens to voices. One fine day, she finds her dead grandfather sitting on his chair in his study with a book. As she came closer, he disappeared. This episode repeats itself a number of times until she is convinced that he has risen from the dead to communicate with her. Alice sets out on a long, tremulous journey trying to...

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