Longlisted for The Center For Fiction's 2024 First Novel Prize • Elle 's Best Literary
Fiction Books of 2024 list “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.”
