Growing up, I experienced the rare privilege of knowing my great-grandmother. I vividly remember her enthusiasm for card games. Every Thanksgiving, we would sit at the dining table with my family, playing UNO late into the night. My Nana would occasionally win, and a smile of joy in victory would beam across her face.
I lost my Nana during my formative years. It was a blow to my heart, and I spent a long time grieving her. Back then, I didn’t have the words to embody the loss I felt. But I believe I’ve found their echo many years later in Meghana Mysore’s debut story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart.
Let All Our Ghosts Depart is an intricate exploration of what it means to lose someone you love. Grief is the collection’s common thread: how it traps the ones left behind in the past, or suspends mourners in a cycle, preventing them from moving forward.
As Ramya’s mother says in the story “A Pure Thing” — “You get stuck somewhere and you miss what’s happening all around you.”
In “Hoarder,” a young woman loses her sister to a deadly disease and spends her time collecting men who turn into scarves whenever they leave her. Her inability to let go of her scarves is symbolic of her grief over her sister, and she hoards to feel closer to the past. Much like Alia, the protagonist of “A Sweater for You” has lost her sibling and finds it hard to move on. Because Mamatha is aging, she must also confront the loss of her own body. Her life is riddled with grief — both for the past and the present — and the story ends in tragedy, with Mamatha’s heartbreak so big, she cannot put it into words.
In perhaps my favorite story of the collection, “Blood and Bone,” Parvati, a young artist, keeps in touch with her deceased father over FaceTime. Ever since he died six years ago, they have been talking over the phone every evening. But when Parvati’s father learns that he must move on in a week, Parvati faces a grave challenge: letting go. The most compelling moment of the story is on the night Parvati’s father disappears, when Parvati tells him that no one understands her grief. Her father’s response is powerful and poignant: “Look around you… Everybody knows something about loss.” Did I spill water on my face, or are those tears leaking down my cheeks?
The wonder of Mysore’s collection lies in the idea that grieving is not a solitary act. In the title story “Let All Our Ghosts Depart,” the unnamed narrator takes on her grandmother’s sister’s ghost, allowing her grandmother to let go of the grief that had long plagued her. In “Hoarder” and “A Sweater for You,” Alia and Mamatha are seen and touched by the women in their lives, who help them overcome their loss. Both Mira and Isha bear witness to the protagonists’ scars and call them beautiful. There is a beauty in the way we mourn the people we love, they seem to say.
Mysore’s prose is hauntingly lyrical — hers is a voice that echoes through time to touch those of us who have experienced loss. Mysore masterfully mirrors the looping nature of grief through her tightly controlled imagery and incantatory sentences. Taken together, her stories form a uniquely inventive collection that expands what contemporary fiction can do, blending realism and fabulism to reshape the boundaries between the living and the dead.
I wish my Nana were alive to experience this collection. 96 years brought her such wisdom and understanding, and I think she would have appreciated stories like “A Sweater for You” and “Blood and Bone,” having gone through more loss than anyone else in my family. These are stories that I and many grieving readers will be thankful to return to again and again.
FICTION
Let All Our Ghosts Depart
By Meghana Mysore
West Virginia University Press
Published September 1, 2026
Southern Review of Books 