Author: Howard Norman

Howard Norman is an American novelist, memoirist, and translator whose fiction often places intimate domestic tensions within the landscapes of Atlantic Canada and northern New England. His books include The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and Next Life Might Be Kinder, works known for restrained narration and an alertness to memory, art, and haunting. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published The Ghost Clause in 2019. Simon Inescort narrates the novel while remaining in the Vermont farmhouse once shared with his wife, Lorca, as a new couple, Muriel and Zachary, take possession. From that unusual viewpoint, Norman links two marriages across time and observes how a house stores affection, secrecy, grief, and unfinished conversation. Literary suspense and supernatural presence work together throughout the novel. The ghost is not simply an effect; his limited ability to intervene gives the story its moral pressure and makes observation itself generate tension. Norman turns a property clause into a meditation on attachment, responsibility, and the traces people leave in shared rooms.