The ancestors in The Great Wherever are sharp-tongued, opinionated, and really, seriously furious. After four generations of watching their descendants lose pieces of a Tennessee farm to bad luck, bad timing, and one breathtakingly cold-blooded act of legal theft, who can blame them?
The Great Wherever | Shanon Sanders | Henry Holt and Co. (416 pages)
Shannon Sanders has written a novel of remarkable sweep, the kind that seduces readers into one family’s history until the hours disappear. She has also written the best explanation of adverse possession you will ever read, which is not a sentence I expected to write this year.
That family is the Lambs, Black landowners in Lanyer County whose story, anchored to a single piece of Tennessee farmland, unfolds across nearly a century. As the living struggle to hold onto the farm, generations of sharp-tongued ancestors look on with equal parts love, frustration, and the occasional ancestral eye-roll.
Sanders isn’t interested in legal doctrine for its own sake. She wants to show what happens when ordinary people encounter the law at the worst moments of their lives, and how decisions made in one generation shape the next.
When Aubrey Lamb inherits her late father Micah’s interest in the farm, she expects a practical decision about its future. Instead, she inherits generations of family conflict, cousins who know this history far better than she does, and developers who see opportunity where the family sees home. Specifically, two very charming Hightower Group attorneys at the county’s only Mexican restaurant, gesturing at dotted lines on a map and talking about how life-changing this could be for everyone.
As someone fascinated by property and inheritance, I especially loved the way Sanders explores how legal decisions echo across generations. Wills, intestacy, partition disputes, adverse possession, and competing claims of ownership aren’t simply plot devices. They shape entire lives and family histories.
The large cast occasionally takes work to follow (I was grateful for the family tree I eventually sketched myself and suspect readers will appreciate the one included in the finished edition), but Sanders gives each generation a distinct voice. Aubrey sometimes tested my patience (and that of her forebearers). Even so, Sanders earns her growth. Aubrey is ultimately a late bloomer rather than a lost cause, and by the final pages I was completely invested.
Big Had a Plan: The Original Sin
The legal engine of The Great Wherever begins with a failure.
When the family patriarch known as Big dies without a will, Tennessee’s intestacy statutes divide the farm among his widow and seven children. The result is legally correc
t and emotionally disastrous. Some heirs want to preserve the homestead. Others want to cash out. A judge orders partition, carving the property into what Sanders memorably calls “little slices of nothing.” Big had always intended to leave everything to his wife. He just never wrote it down.
Sanders treats this as the original sin from which everything else follows, and she’s right. Later generations learn the lesson. They find Lawyer Man (a local attorney paid in church shoes and homemade peach wine) and set about doing everything right. They write wills. They update them. They plan carefully. Sanders refuses the comforting fiction that doing everything right guarantees the right outcome.
Open and Notorious
The novel’s most devastating legal moment arrives after a windstorm destroys the fence separating the Lamb property from the neighboring Lanyer farm. While the family is consumed by the death of a son, the Lanyers rebuild the fence twelve acres south of its original location.
Twenty years later, a judge calls it adverse possession.
It is one of the clearest fictional illustrations of the doctrine I’ve encountered (the occupation open and notorious, the Lambs never formally objecting, the Lanyers knowing the judge), but Sanders’ larger point is even more unsettling. The Lambs didn’t lose their land because they were careless. They lost it because they were grieving. And they were asking for justice in a place called Lanyer County.
The Lanyers didn’t out-lawyer the Lambs. They out-waited them. Legal inaction doesn’t simply divide an asset. It fractures a family.
Everyone Gets a Piece
Sanders is fictionalizing something extensively documented. A 2019 investigation by The New Yorker and ProPublica (paywalled, but worth tracking down) traced how Black families across the South have lost ancestral land through heirs’ property disputes, partition actions, adverse possession, and tax sales. Between 1910 and 1997, African Americans lost roughly ninety percent of their farmland.
Against that history, the Hightower Group attorneys and their palomas aren’t simply plot devices. They represent a pattern. Developers need only purchase the interest of a single heir to force a partition sale of an entire property. They arrive with charm and dotted lines and talk of life-changing outcomes for the family.
Which brings us back to Aubrey. When she learns she and her cousins hold the farm as tenants in common (each owning an independent fractional share they can sell without the others’ consent), the stakes of her spectacular indecision become suddenly, uncomfortably clear.
“I could sell my quarter? Without your permission?”
The words burst from her before she can stop them. Her cousin Hays sighs. She doesn’t own a quarter, as it turns out. She owns a third.
The Hightower Group knows exactly what tenancy in common means. Developers don’t need unanimous agreement. They need one heir who is overwhelmed, cash-strapped, or simply not reading her emails. Sanders understands that property law operates on people during moments of grief, uncertainty, financial pressure, and exhaustion. Legal vulnerability is very often emotional vulnerability.
The dead keep watching because they’ve seen this story before. Unlike the living, they know exactly what’s at stake. You can almost hear the ancestors screaming: “Look at the fence.”
Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt for the advance copy.
“I love this!”
— Shannon Sanders, Author