A multigenerational story—a dazzling portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction through the 1930s to the present day.
THE GREAT WHEREVER
by Shannon Sanders
Holt, Spring 2026
(via DeFiore and Company)
THE GREAT WHEREVER is a multigenerational story—a dazzling portrait of a family and its history in the American South, from Reconstruction through the 1930s to the present day. As she’s done in her previous short story work, Sanders sends the reader on a kind of intellectual treasure hunt through generations. She is especially brilliant about invisible legacies—not only family secrets, but also lineages hidden in plain sight; aspects of a family tree that are consciously and unconsciously shaped, especially by women; and inheritances that are interrupted or thwarted, sometimes violently.
The novel is about a family, but it also breaks open the idea of what a family is, how a family interacts with land, history, time. Sanders conveys this all while being so attentive to the life and character and thoughts and feelings of one very specific and very relatable millennial.
In the tradition of expansive family sagas The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow, and with the thoroughly modern anxieties and crackling social commentary of novels like Such a Fun Age. The Great Wherever is a story of race and generational wealth, family and ambition, and a young woman’s coming-to-terms with her legacy.
Exploring the many people, places, and events that can shape our inheritances without our knowing Sanders puts forth the notion that each generation exerts an influence on the ones to follow, even when that influence isn’t consciously felt and people are challenged to find their own emotional truths. This is an intricate meditation on the ways we learn to define ourselves in—and out of—our loved ones’ orbits, how we carry forward after loss, and what is choice and what is fate in the tumultuous conveyance of an ancestral home across generations.
Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Sanders’ debut story collection Company won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, was named a Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly, was an Indie Next Pick, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.