The Spirits
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
W. W. Norton, October 13, 2026
The best-selling author of The Waters (a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick) returns with a tale of love, transgression, and the miraculous healing power of the holiday table.
In this contemporary Christmas Carol, Bonnie Jo Campbell has created a complex, gritty, spooky, and ultimately heartwarming holiday story that unfolds in an isolated farmhouse. It is the night before Christmas in a small town in Michigan, and a young woman is haunted by her father’s death. She has been silently penitent for nine years, but being stuck in the past has embittered her, made her cut herself off emotionally from her community and her family, despite her deep devotion to them. When a surprising guest appears at the (dreaded) Christmas Eve dinner, the family opens up to reveal their secrets. Redemption is never easy or wholesale, but sometimes a family needs a good story as much as they need to face the truth. In this remarkable exploration of crime and punishment, salvation arrives at the darkest hour. The power of familial love and a sense of humor promise a brighter and more joyful new beginning for the whole family.
Selected Praise for The Waters
One of the Washington Post’s 50 Best Books of 2024
One of Oprah's "Most Immersive Books of 2024"
A Today Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Selection
One of Oprah Daily’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year
One of the Chicago Review of Books’s 12 Must-Read Books of the Month
Featured in Roxane Gay’s newsletter, The Audacity
One of Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books of the Month
"[Bonnie Jo] Campbell has been exploring hardship, especially the hardships that independent and exploratory women have to work through, for most of her writing career. She knows that unexpected misfortunes have to be put up with, and the question is always whether to do it your own way or to give in to the people around you and embark on a life you do not want… The Waters is a thought-provoking and readable exploration of eccentricity and of all different kinds of love―familial love, romantic love, love of knowledge, love of animals, and love of one’s own environment, even when it is a difficult place to live."
―Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times
"On a swampy island in Michigan, an outcast herbalist and her granddaughter contend with traumatic family secrets and an absent mother in this vividly drawn corner of rural America." ―The New York Times Book Review
"Bonnie Jo Campbell proves her mastery of Midwestern Gothic in The Waters… Lush, brackish, and bracing." ―Christian Science Monitor
"Atmospheric and witchy, this is a story to savor, line by line, and return to, year after year." ―Oprah Daily
"Bonnie Jo Campbell has quietly become one of our best writers. She brings news you haven’t heard before, and that’s why I read. Her new novel, The Waters, is written in prose strong and lyrical, and tells a story so deeply rooted in a specific place that the accumulation of details approaches the magical."
―Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone
"Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters is a novel, a living myth, and a place… Imagine a mash-up of Flannery O’Connor and the Brothers Grimm, of Angela Carter’s reimagined fairy tales and William Faulkner’s gothic sublime. And yet, The Waters is all Bonnie Jo. If you’ve read her, you know what I mean, how she sees and evokes us, and this land we inhabit, covered in mayapples and dogwood, cuntshells and quickmuck, with a masterful, tender objectivity. The Waters is no utopia. It is muddy and bloody; it swallows us whole and effervesces into fog. It is the magic we’d inhabit if we still believed in magic, the dream we’d have if we could sleep."
―Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frank: Sonnets
"The Waters will suck you into its muddy gut and not let go.… A powerful, fragrant, readable, almost edible novel. In The Waters, Bonnie Jo Campbell, who understands the women and men of the no-longer-prosperous rural Midwest better than anyone, dreams up a marshy Northwoods township where factual flora and fauna, soil quality and agricultural practice, demographics and religious affiliation somehow share a long, dotted, antic boundary line with Oz and The Blue Fairy Book, with märchen, folkways, and ancient myth."
―Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award–winning author of Lord of Misrule
"There are scenes of sadness and turmoil in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s superb new novel, but at its core is an abiding sense of wonder. We encounter that wonder in Campbell’s minute attentiveness to her rural Michigan landscape as well as to her understanding of the complexities of the human heart. Nevertheless, for all the novel’s vividness, The Waters has an ethereal quality that we enter as if into a waking dream, and even after we turn the last page, we remain under its spell, enchanted."
―Ron Rash, author of Serena
"If you enjoy reading about strong, independent, purposeful women who thrive in the face of adversity and in spite of serious flaws, both personal and professional, this is a book for you… From lurking vengeful locals with firearms to deadly snakes protected by federal law, this tale moves irresistibly to an end that fulfills the promise of the rest of the book. It also addresses some trenchant current issues that appear in the news daily but are not, in fact, new, but age-old problems that continue to baffle those with prospective solutions. It is a muscular and meaningful book that should be great book group material." ―Reading the West
"This is a verdant, gripping, and clarion saga of home, family, and womanhood, of meaningful work and metamorphosis, of poisons and antidotes, and the urgent need for us to heal and sustain the imperiled living world that heals and sustains us."
―Booklist, starred review
"With an electrifying vocabulary all its own (here, cigarettes are coffin nails, and plant names roll off the tongue with ease), The Waters is a novel that is rife with enchantments―a classic in the making, introducing generations of heroines who are destined to be beloved." ―Foreword, starred review
"Campbell, who lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, is one of American fiction’s leading voices about rural life: the struggle to make a living, the beauty of the wild environment, the thorny and sometimes violent relationships between men and women, and the economic and industrial pressures that threaten everything…filled with vivid descriptions of the diverse flora of this wetlands, The Waters is a realistic novel with a strong thread of fairy tale running through it[.] The Waters builds toward an incredible climactic episode that addresses the great divide running through this imperiled community." ―Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"With its detailed portrayal of nature and its mystical elements, The Waters paints a vivid picture of life in a rural area." ―Detroit Free Press
"One of the most important voices in American fiction.” ―Book Riot
"I especially loved all the descriptive details… [The Waters] is a wonderful winter read that has you inspired for warmer springtime weather ahead." ―New York Post
About the Author
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Waters, a national bestseller, and American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband and donkeys.
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