Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
Published by Vintage
Publication date: October 15, 2020
Genres: Book Clubs, Fiction, Contemporary
Bookshop
A successful food writer, Nina Dean is happy with her life. She has close friends, her own apartment in London, and her breakup with her longtime boyfriend was amicable. She’s happy being alone, but a partner would be nice as well, so with her sense of self-esteem mostly in place she makes the foray back into the dating world. It’s that simple decision that sets the dominoes in motion in Dolly Alderton’s contemporary slice-of-life novel, Ghosts.
Nina is not alone on the page. Alderton provides a wonderful ensemble of characters and story lines that will read as familiar to anyone who’s in their early 30s or has lived through them. There are all the attendant hassles and pleasures of this time of life, whether it’s negotiating with a rude and unreasonable neighbor, managing a career, or coping with the changes in her father’s mental health. Nina handles it all, her equilibrium being tested only when she starts dating.
The premise is a straightforward one, but Ghosts is a richly textured novel, one that explores the many phases and shades of womanhood. There is Nina, content with her life; her friend Lola, who fervently believes in a soulmate and marriage; her best friend Katherine, who’s veered away from their friendship group and into marriage and motherhood or even her mother, facing her older husband’s failing health. Alderton could take the story so many ways and yet Ghosts flows naturally with no manipulation or contrivance. Some questionable choices, yes, but who hasn’t made those?
What brought the novel to the next level was the way Nina faces her life. There is the painful fading away of her vibrant father set against her mother’s seeming denial of his decline, forcing her to reckon with her blind spots about her parents and their marriage. Alderton writes these experiences with a grace and bracing honesty. She is less tender, but more incisive in delving into the psyche of 30-something men and the disregard they so often pay the women around them. It may just be a biological imperative and difference between the genders, but this exploration is real and painfully relatable. That all of this is threaded through with sharp, biting humor is why I loved Ghosts so much.
Like novels where the woman comes first and the romance is second? Try Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan
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