Anyone's Ghost

A Novel

By: August Thompson

Narrated by: Lee Osorio

Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

“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.”

©2024 August Thompson (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[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

“Thompson's touching, unforgettable story follows the two across the years as their relationship changes, but their shared history continues to hold them together.”—Town and Country (best books of summer 2024)

“A novel that shares its name with a song by The National will always stir my interest. Thompson’s debut, which has received glowing praise from literary heavyweights Jonathan Safran Foer and Junot Diaz, tracks the blurred-lines intimacy of two boys who meet as teenagers and dart in and out of one another’s lives.”—Electric Literature

Exquisite

Beautiful raw tender intense authentic insightful painful funny poetic inspiring sexy uncomfortable cinematic (already cast and location scouted the limited Netflix series in my mind) I loved this book and hated to come to the end… so I started it again from the beginning…

A tender, intimate portrait, skillfully narrated

In Theron David Alden, August Thomson gives us a sensitive, introspective protagonist who’s navigating the journey from adolescence to young manhood—and his confusing, formative relationship with the slightly older Jake. Anyone’s Ghost has been described as a “queer coming of age novel,” but its themes of identity, friendship, and first love are universal and relatable, even for this 60-something cisgender female reader.

Thompson’s writing delivers one dopamine hit after another: the nuanced observations that had me nodding in recognition, the fresh turns of phrase. Halfway through this listen, I bought a hard copy so I could go back and study Thompson's craft. I look forward to reading the novel, but I’m glad I listened to it first: Lee Osorio’s narration creates a vivid, immersive experience that does justice to Thompson’s prose.

My question now is: Who will direct the film? I see Timothée Chalamet in the lead role.