Anyone's Ghost cover art

Anyone's Ghost

perfect for fans of A Little Life and Call Me By Your Name

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About this listen

The gorgeous, devastating must-read queer love story of the summer.

'It should be placed alongside modern love stories such as Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow'– Crack

IT TOOK THREE CAR CRASHES TO KILL JAKE

The first crash. New Hampshire. Teenagers Theron and Jake meet in the heat of the summer. Jake is everything Theron wants to be – hot, cool, interesting. Drunk in Jake’s van on their last night together, they hurtle off a dirt road at 2am.

The second crash. New York City. Jake and Theron have drifted apart, but when they are reunited in the midst of a hurricane, they are both forever changed.

The third crash. Texas. Driving on a lonely highway, Jake finds the oblivion he has always been chasing in one final collision, and Theron is left to grapple with the ghosts of their past.

August Thompson's debut Anyone's Ghost is

'Genuinely powerful' - The Irish Times

'Electric' - 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

'This book will make you cry' – Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated

 Coming of Age Friendship Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction World Literature Haunted Ghost

Critic reviews

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
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.
A beautiful exploration of the all-encompassing nature of friendship, specifically male friendship, and the devastating speed at which grief can derail your life.
All stars
Most relevant
This story beautifully encapsulated those incredibly strong and intense emotions that come from relationships like Theron's and Jake's that can't really be labelled. The honesty and truth in the story shows that the author knows these emotions himself, I can't imagine you can write about them so accurately other wise.

Raw, poignant and beautiful

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I feel like I would have enjoyed this book better if I’d read it rather than listened to it. The narrator’s droning tones and inflections at the end of a sentence as if he’s continously asking a question was a real slog. Not enough to not finish this book, but enough to not fully embrace it. Also no character development whatsoever. Things happen, Theron whines and wallows in self-pity, things happen and it’s back to pining & whining. Not for me.

Flat narrator

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