BELOVED TUNDRA AUTHOR: Like her brilliant picture books for children, Sara’s adult writing is imaginative and engaging. We’re so thrilled to keep her in the PRHC family and welcome her to team Doubleday.

DEBUT NOVEL: Sara O’Leary has penned several beloved children’s books and two collections of short stories for adults, but The Ghost in the House is her first novel.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?: Whether you believe in ghosts or not, this novel forces readers to confront powerful questions about death and the ties that bind us.

TWIST ENDING: This deceptively simple novel has a surprising conclusion.

SARA O’LEARY is a writer of fiction for both adults and children. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Comfort Me With Apples; a series of postcard stories, Wish You Were Here; as well as a number of picture books, including (in collaboration with Julie Morstad) the beloved This Is Sadie. She first studied fiction at the Saskatchewan School of the Arts and went on to complete an MFA at the University of British Columbia. She has taught screenwriting and writing for children at Concordia University in Montreal.

Author Residence: Hudson, QC

Advance Praise for The Ghost in the House:

“Sara O’Leary’s The Ghost in the House, riven by ambiguities and dissolutions, is a story of both love and profound solitude. Piercing, disorienting and tender.” —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Sorrowful, lovely and funny in equal parts, The Ghost in the House depicts overwhelming love in heartbreaking counterbalance with an inescapable loneliness.” —Lynn Coady, author of Watching You Without Me
 
“Sara O’Leary opens the front of Fay’s dollhouse life to examine love and grief as only she can, with a penetrating view of the smallest things that make us eternally loving, endlessly lonely and forever indelibly ourselves.” —Marina Endicott, author of The Difference 

“I so loved this deeply moving tale of loss and acceptance. A ghost stuck in her house, haunting her husband and his new family. (An extraordinary tale for these housebound times.)” —Edward Carey, author of Little

“The Ghost in the House is a beautiful reverie on how we live and love, a dream of a novel that left me stealing furtive glances at my loved ones, willing myself to appreciate them more and tell them so while we’re all still here. If you’ve lost someone you love, or wondered what it will feel like when it happens, O’Leary’s ghost will haunt you—in the best way.” —Jessica Francis Kane, author of Rules for Visiting
 
“A thirty-something ghost yearning for her life, a teenage girl toying with ending hers. Can they help each other to move on? This is the extraordinary premise of Sara O’Leary’s The Ghost in the House, a novel written with such aching delicacy it will haunt you long after you’ve turned the final page.” —Esta Spalding, author of The Fitzgerald-Trout series