"Ghosts are unfinished business," says American author Jesmyn Ward, "and as black people in a country that formerly enslaved us, we have a lot of that."

Her third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing is haunted by such ghosts. Its narrators, 13-year-old mixed-race Jojo and his drug addict mother Leonie, can see them - from a black boy murdered in prison at the age of 12 to Leonie's 19-year-old brother Given, who was shot dead by a white man and who appears to her when she takes cocaine.