A ghost story of a ghost story.
The great cranky viet grandma of ghost stories.

GHOST ƠI, the debut novel of lawrence-minh bùi davis (forthcoming Spring 2027), follows a young woman called to be a spirit medium in a misbegotten outpost of the Vietnamese diaspora called “California.” Ghosts abound, but with no one to teach her to listen to the dead, she sets out to find a teacher, following a trail of ghosts, making her way toward a world inside the world.

GHOST ƠI is a book of recovering hidden histories and possibilities, including those of queer ancestors–maybe shamans–lost to precolonial time.

It’s also one of ceding control, accepting limits of knowing, for narrator and author and reader alike: all the ghosts of the novel are “channeled,” or written, not by the author but other viet diasporic writers and artists–including Ocean Vuong, Cathy Linh Che, Monique Truong, Bao Phi, Mimi Khúc, among others–then incorporated into the book without questions or edits. The ghosts simply appear, and our narrator has to figure out how to make sense of them, or sometimes live with the distinct possibility of not being able to.

The result is a reimagining of refugee life and death, and of what it means to commune, in broken language, with our ghosts. Plus viet dirty jokes.

Stay tuned for pre-orders Summer 2026.