Ghosted

Jenn Ashworth

Paperback

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE PORTICO PRIZE 2022

'Unnerving, absorbing . . . Laurie is a miraculous creation . . . Piercingly human and darkly funny' Sunday Times

One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband disappears, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks she tells no one, carrying on her cleaning job at the university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her high-rise flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports him as missing, the police are suspicious. What took her so long?

Laurie can't fully explain her behaviour even to herself, or the strange presence she senses in the flat. Only when she looks back on the ensuing wreckage does she begin to understand, and see how she might repair the damage.

Book Details

Publisher: Sceptre
Publish Date: Apr 14th, 2022
Pages: 304
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.70in - 5.10in - 1.00in - 0.60lb
EAN: 9781529336788
Categories: • Family Life - Marriage & Divorce• Thrillers - Domestic• Humorous - Dark Humor

About the Author

Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston. She studied English at Cambridge and since then has gained an MA from Manchester University, trained as a librarian and run a prison library in Lancashire. She now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask Award. In 2011 her second, Cold Light, was published by Sceptre and she was chosen by BBC's The Culture Show as one of the twelve Best New British Novelists. Her most recent novels, The Friday Gospels and Fell, were published to resounding critical acclaim. She has also written a memoir, Notes Made While Falling. She lives in Lancaster with her husband, son and daughter.

Praise for this book

Raw, darkly comic and moving--Best

From her debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, Ashworth's work has explored physical discomfort, violence and sexual misadventure. She writes explicitly of physicality and its often petrifying opposite - disembodiment. There are moments in Ghosted that are at once terrifying and blackly humorous . . . an impressive reminder of the uneasy silence reverberating on the other side of grief.--Guardian

Ghosts, buried trauma and lingering absences suffuse this darkly funny and compelling novel.--Tatler

A revelatory portrait of a marriage. Although Laurie is acerbic and funny, this is an immeasurably sad read, aching with the unacknowledged grief of a complicated couple who have lost more than they can say.--Daily Mirror

A brilliant 21st-century take on the Gothic: a woman, whose husband just vanishes, is left to the frantic silence of abandonment and virtual reality's eerie twilight. A seriously gifted writer surely due a big prize.--Irish Times

Stunning . . . Ghosted is a séance disguised as a novel.--The London Magazine

Fresh, darkly funny and exceptionally moving . . . Ashworth folds grief and anger and love into every line.

Ghosted perfectly captures the claustrophobia of living in your own mind. Ashworth's writing is both acerbic and insightful. She has created a protagonist who is as flawed and as interesting as most memorable people are.

There are dark and alluring undercurrents to everything that Jenn Ashworth produces, and she has a brilliantly uncanny ability to unnerve at every turn. To me, her psychologically driven work ranks alongside such singular spiritual ancestors as Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys and Shirley Jackson.

This is a book to bring hope.

Tender, rude, funny, sad, moving, thrilling, heartbreaking, devastating. Perfect.

Ashworth's writing is often referred to as "unnerving" and I wonder if that's because of her immense talent for honing in on our deepest fears.--Northern Soul

Unnerving, absorbing . . . Ashworth's setting is a small unnamed northwestern university city . . . a clever, gripping, refreshingly urban setting for a novel that plays with tropes from not just ghost stories but also murder mysteries . . . The mentally restless Laurie is a miraculous creation, somehow managing to be both a not entirely reliable narrator and yet solidly sympathetic. Piercingly human and darkly funny, Ghosted is a tender, beautifully controlled account of expectations knocked off course.--Sunday Times

Since her 2009 debut A Kind of Intimacy, Jenn Ashworth has been quietly collecting honours for her distinctive, empathetic and sharply observed novels, of which Ghosted is another . . . She writes powerfully and movingly about lives shaped by need, love and loss, as well as the solipsism of ferocious grief.--Daily Mail

A vivid, blackly funny and heartbreaking portrait of a marriage and the tiny and large hurts within it, how they wear at us and haunt us despite everything, but I found it beautifully hopeful too.

A marvellous novel; thrumming with the absences and presences that can haunt a life, and shot through with flashes of great sadness and joy. If you don't know Jenn Ashworth's work already - which you should - this is a great place to start.

Ghosted is deeply unsettling - Laurie is such a believable complex person, I couldn't look away from her life. It's also just so utterly compelling and funny. The writing is impeccable and the dark heart of the novel is uncomfortably human and relatable.

Dark, funny, thrilling and deeply human, Ghosted is a book that will haunt you forever, and you'll be glad. Jenn Ashworth is a master of modern storytelling.