Ghostlands - Andrew Fox

Mushrooming Time

Francesco Helios, a groundskeeper in New Shining Capital, runs a “mower,” a seventy-ton leveling machine that keeps the Lawn free of the bloom of mushrooming monuments. Like an unruly yard, structures shove their way up through the turf: the obelisk of the Washerman Monument, the temple of “Old Frog Face,” and a thousand other stubborn relics from a half-recollected past that refuse to stay mowed down.

While Francesco is mowing, a ghostly woman appears on the Lawn. Unlike other human ghosts reborn from the past, the woman recognizes Francesco. She calls him by a name he doesn’t recognize, but that resonates. Timebreaker.

Soon Francecso is catapulted to dockyards cluttered with mushrooming battleships and across the country to plains of ghostly buffalo, all with a madman on his trail who seeks to transform Francesco into a “grubber,” dedicated to the eradication of CAHSPEI—Chronologically Anomalous Human-Seeming Phenomenon (Emergent-Insubstantial)—that is, to the murder of human ghosts from the past. 

Yet if the Timebreaker is real—and he is the one— then maybe even a lowly groundskeeper can save his family from ruin, himself from oblivion—and, in the process, wrench humanity from the suicidal rubber room of rebounding time his mushroom-haunted world has become.

Winner of the 2026 Ark Prize for best novel.