Anyone's Ghost | August Thompson

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.”
 

About the Author

August Thompson was born and raised in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. He studied in New York and Berlin, wasted all of his good hearing at metal shows, taught English in Spain for two years, and spent another two on couches across three continents. He returned to New York as a Goldwater Fellow at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Anyone's Ghost is his first novel.