A tribute to the author's mother Kitty, the gritty Chicago landscape of his youth, and the "ghost years, that time in your life you don't know won't never come again."

Barry Gifford has been writing the story of America in acclaimed novel after acclaimed novel for the last half-century. Almost all of the stories in Ghost Years takes place in the 1950s, examining the lives of women in that period—the suppression, the lack of opportunities, the dependency on men. Following his story collection, Roy's World, which inspired the documentary directed by Rob Christopher, narrated by Lili Taylor, Matt Dillon and Willem Dafoe, these stories show a childhood in mid-century America filled with innocence, grief, joy and wonder in equal measure.