Title: Anyone's Ghost
Author: August Thompson
Genre: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 978-1035034086
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: 2024
Publisher Description: 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.
August Thompson was born and raised in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. He studied in New York and Berlin, wasted all of his good hearing at metal shows, taught English in Spain for two years, and spent another two on couches across three continents. He returned to New York as a Goldwater Fellow at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Anyone's Ghost is his first novel.
Literary Atelier Review: Sometimes you come across a book and just like meeting the great love of your life you know instantly that you two are meant to be. This is how I felt when I discovered a signed copy of Anyone's Ghost in my local Thalia bookstore in Potsdamer Platz Berlin. The cover, the blurb, the references to a love of metal music, even the mini biography of Thompson who like me had lived in Berlin, everything about this book was me. Plus I absolutely love signed copies of books, I collect them, thus the book simply had to be mine.
Anyone's Ghost tells a beautiful, vivid, romantic tale of two boys, aged 15 and 17 when they first meet in the early 2000s, who go on to develop a love which crosses from friendship into more, as they become adults. The novel is so beautifully written, the lyricism is worthy of the song inspired title. This is an amazing debut which I believe signals the beginning of a brilliant literary career to come.