This is a hard novel to categorize, being equal parts love story, mystery, and ghost story. It’s about Ned Conti, a struggling young academic, doing historical research on the past of a nun, for a Catholic priest trying to prove that she was a saint. It’s about the strange paranormal activities that have suddenly started taking place in his Brooklyn apartment, among them, stones falling from the ceiling. It’s about being stuck, with a stalled career, broke, and drinking too much. It’s about actual ghosts, unrestful spirits, and it’s about being haunted by the memory of the troubled woman who broke his heart ten years prior.

It takes place in a very gritty and un-gentrified New York, and in the seamier parts of New Orleans, both in the twentieth and the nineteenth centuries. There are many more sinners than saints in this world, but Madeleine’s Ghost is about the good and the evil that we can do, and about long ago mistakes finally being rectified. And it’s about miracles. Girardi rather cleverly ties up the many disparate strands here, and even manages some satisfyingly happy endings for these uneasy souls, past and present.

Read this one on a quiet night…maybe on Halloween? It’s a good time for magic, and for remembering the faithful departed.

NOVEL: Madeleine’s Ghost

AUTHOR: Robert Girardi

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1995

IMAGE: book cover, Dell reprint edition