Anya's Ghost

Anya's Ghost is a coming-of-age ghost story in graphic novel format, the first book by the cartoonist Vera Brosgol, published on 7 June 2011. It took four years to get from the idea to publication, and it is drawn predominantly in hues of violet.

Annushka Borzakovskaya, known as Anya, is a Russian emigre living in the United States with her mother and her six-year-old brother Sasha. She is unpopular at her New England private school, and she skips a day of it to walk through a nearby forest, where she falls into a dry well and lands beside a human skeleton. The skeleton's ghost, a shy girl called Emily, explains that she too fell into the well and died of dehydration after breaking her neck ninety years earlier, and asks to be Anya's friend; she cannot move far from her bones, which are left behind when Anya is rescued. Emily then begins helping Anya at school, and the help is effective, but after failing to make her popular and happy she becomes manipulative and controlling, which sets Anya looking into what really happened to her ninety years before.

Brosgol's book is a full-length graphic novel rather than an illustrated text, and it moves between Anya's ordinary school days and the ghost's much longer history across the same sequence of panels.