Anyone's Ghost
A Novel
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- USD 3.99
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- USD 3.99
Descripción editorial
A 2025 Lamda Literary Award finalist • Longlisted for The Center For Fiction's 2024 First Novel Prize • Named a Best Book of 2024 by Elle, Vogue, and Debutiful
“This new novel is a real heart-squeezer. Beautiful, one of a kind and perfectly titled.” —Matt Berninger, The National
“Anyone’s Ghost is about so very many things: the pains of growing up, friendship and pining, drugs, sex, the frustrations of masculinity and the thrill of testing death itself. But more than any of that, it is an overwhelmingly beautiful love story. This book will make you cry.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
An extraordinary debut novel in which the transforming love and friendship between two young men during one unforgettable teenage summer in rural New England haunts them into adulthood
It took three car crashes to kill Jake.
Theron David Alden is there for the first two: the summer they meet in rural New Hampshire, when he’s fifteen and anxious, and Jake’s seventeen and a natural; then six years later in New York City, those too-short, ecstatic, painful nights that change both their lives forever—the end of the dream and the longing for the dream and the dream itself, all at once.
Theron is not there for the third crash.
And yet, their story contains so much joy and self-discovery: the glorious, stupid simplicity of a boyhood joke; the devastation of insecurity; the way a great song can distill a universe; the limits of what we can know about each other; the mysterious, porous, ungraspable fault line between yourself and the person you love better than yourself; the beautiful, toxic elixir of need and hope and want.
Brimming with rare, radioactive talent, August Thompson has written a love story that is electrically alive and exquisitely tuned.
In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, “This book will make you cry.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thompson debuts with the moody and moving chronicle of a complicated friendship between two young men. In the first sentence, the reader learns from Theron, the 30-something narrator, that his friend Jake recently died in a car accident. Theron then rewinds to 2004, when he's 15 and he follows his father from Los Angeles to New Hampshire after his parents split. He gets a job at the local hardware store, where Jake, who's two years older, is the manager. Their meeting is a "sea change" for Theron, who feels a "spike of desire" for Jake as they smoke weed and bond over their love of Metallica. From there, Theron's obsession with Jake propels the nonlinear narrative as it touches down at different points in their timeline—there's heartache when Jake bails on plans to visit him in Los Angeles in 2009, and excitement when they finally reunite in New York City a few years later, where Theron has recently graduated from NYU and is in an on-and-off relationship with his girlfriend. Thompson skillfully captures Theron's vulnerability, especially when the two men finally act on their mutual attraction and later when Theron deals with the impact of Jake's death. This marks Thompson as a writer to watch.
