Brianne has a young son and Lelah is struggling to be a good mother and grandmother.

A victim of domestic violence, she used to live with her daughter Brianne in a Detroit apartment.

In appointments with his comely female therapist, Cha-Cha ponders the past: 'Had his childhood been a happy one? The question felt irrelevant.' As one sister says, 'We weren't traumatized. Hearing talk of ghosts in the hospital, an insurance agent stipulates that for Cha-Cha to keep his job he must speak to a psychiatrist. Fifty years later, it comes back for him: this sixty-something trucker, married with two sons, is spooked and runs his truck off the road. One night when he was 14, a 'haint' (a Southern colloquialism for a ghost or apparition) tried to push him out his bedroom window. Cha-Cha is haunted, literally, by a formative experience from his youth. The novel prioritizes the experiences of the oldest and youngest Turners, Cha-Cha (Charles) and Lelah. Over the course of just five weeks, the 13 middle-aged Turner children have to face their various demons as they come together to decide what will become of their ailing mother's house. On the other hand, the prospect of President Obama's election sparked a new note of optimism. On the one hand, the city was in the throes of financial crisis unemployment was high and property prices had crashed to all-time lows (see ' Beyond the Book'). The Turner House opens in spring 2008, a time characterized by simultaneous despair and hope for Detroit's African-American community. In Flournoy's debut novel, the 13 grown children of Francis and Viola Turner must put aside their own personal baggage and decide what will become of their parents' Detroit house during the financial crisis.

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy