A masterly modern love story starring an unforgettable cast of characters, Anyone's Ghost follows Theron and Jake as they navigate two decades of music, drugs, thrill and pain together.
The lonely life of fifteen-year-old Theron David Alden is transformed when he meets Jake. Older, cooler, more confident and startlingly beautiful, Jake likes the same bands, the same drugs, and has the same drive to oblivion.
Over the course of two decades, Theron and Jake get high, drift apart, and are brought hurtling back together, until a final collision tears them apart forever.
Theron wants Jake, and he wants to be Jake. But is Jake brave enough to want him back?
A gorgeous modern love story about the lives that change us, and the loves that haunt us, Anyone’s Ghost will break your heart.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781035034086
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 428 g
Dimensions: 224 x 145 x 31 mm
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, author of Everything Is Illuminated
You know those books that you take with you everywhere? That you won’t stop talking about to your friends? That bring it all back? That change you? Anyone’s Ghost is that book. Thompson has fired a literary flare into the black night of the universe and the illumination is spectacular. - Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Genuinely powerful - The Irish Times
This new novel is a real heart-squeezer. Beautiful, one of a kind and perfectly titled - Matt Berninger, frontman of The National
Anyone’s Ghost is a ferocious novel of erotic friendship, uncategorizable love, and vexed masculinity, voiced by a narrator as winning and largehearted as any character I’ve recently met. With its psychedelic prose and fierce moral intelligence, this is one of those books that makes you want to keep living. To read it is to fall more deeply in love with the world. - Maggie Millner, author of Couplets: A Love Story
This is a beautifully observed tale, which really stays with you, and it should be placed alongside modern love stories such as Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Crack
This book is a monster: the magnificent writing, the gallery of characters, the fascinating glimpse into the right now make it stand about twenty feet tall among new books I've read - Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
[An] electric debut novel . . . With shades of André Aciman and Donna Tartt, the book fascinates from its first sentence . . . Thompson’s hypnotic prose and addictive plot moves and exhilarates in equal measure. - Vogue
A beautiful exploration of the all-encompassing nature of friendship, specifically male friendship, and the devastating speed at which grief can derail your life. - Service95
I really enjoyed this novel, and it's so beautifully written and well plotted that I'm amazed it's a debut.
This is a love story with a difference - Theron loves Jake, or does he want to be Jake?...
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Come for the ‘The National’ song reference in the title, stay for the beautiful character work in this tremendous debut novel by August Thompson.
‘Anyone’s Ghost’ takes place over two decades, telling a story of...
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I knew from about twenty pages in to Anyone's Ghost that it was something special. We follow Theron and Jake as they crash in and out of each other's lives over a span of about fifteen years. They meet at... More
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