Ghosted

Silas French has been a department-store Santa for twenty years. This week he got fired. His heart needs a stent, his son hasn't spoken to him in thirteen years, and the only person who still calls is his dead wife's sister, usually to cuss him out.

So when a cruise line offers him a Santa gig on a Christmas sailing to Miami, he takes it. Miami is close to Joey. Close enough to turn up at the door.

Nobody mentions it's a gay cruise.

Ellen Gitelman has waited tables at the same New York diner for forty-six years. This week she was let go, told she has lupus, and talked onto a ship by her best friend Julia, who wants to finish the bucket list they wrote at sixteen. Swim with dolphins. Fall in love. Don't die boring.

What follows involves a drag queen, a priest with a sideline in pharmaceuticals, a near-drowning in Nassau, a storm, a helicopter, and the hardest conversation Silas has ever had.

Funny, profane and unexpectedly tender, this is a novel about the people who stop answering, the ones who never leave, and what happens when you're sixty-seven and decide you're not finished yet.

For readers of A Man Called Ove and The Guncle.