Ghosted

A laid-off Santa and a fired waitress, both sixty-seven, both widowed, end up on the same Christmas cruise. Neither of them knew it was a gay cruise.

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.

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, Ghosted 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.