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.”

"An extraordinary debut novel in which the transforming love and friendship between two young men that erupts during one unforgettable teenage summer in rural New England follows them into adulthood. It took three car crashes to kill Jake. Theron David Alden was there for the first two: the summer they meet in rural New Hampshire, when he's fifteen and Jake's seventeen; then seven years later in New York City, those too-short, nearly sleepless days and nights that change both their lives and end up being all they'll ever have together, the dream and the end of the dream and the longing for the dream, all in one. Theron is not there for the third one. And yet, there is so much joy and self-discovery in these pages: the glorious, stupid simplicity of a boyhood joke; the devastation of minor insecurities; the way a great song can distill a universe inside of a friendship; the limits of what we can know about each other; the mysterious, porous, ungraspable fault line between oneself and the person one loves better than oneself, that beautiful, toxic elixir of need and hope and want. August Thompson, in this debut novel that brims with rare, radioactive talent, writes prose that is electrically alive and exquisitely tuned, and his ability to portray the desires, obsessions, and overwhelming love his characters experience is nothing short of brilliant. In the words of Jonathan Safron Foer, "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.""--