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.

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.

Praise for Anyone’s Ghost:

“[A] dirtbag Call Me by Your Name… Revealing the power of the first flush of romantic and erotic connection… A brash and well-turned coming-of-age tale.”

–Kirkus Reviews

“The moody and moving chronicle of a complicated friendship between two young men. . . Anyone’s Ghost marks Thompson as a writer to watch.”

—Publishers Weekly

“You know those books that you take with you everywhere? That you won’t stop talking about to your friends? That bring it all back? That change you? Anyone’s Ghost is that book. Thompson has fired a literary flare into the black night of the universe and the illumination is spectacular.”
—Junot Díaz

“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

“In Anyone’s Ghost, August Thompson has given us a devastating, heart-cracking, richly imagined love story for the ages. I read hungrily, relishing Thompson’s poetic eye and deep respect for the complexities of life, loss, sexuality, and love.”
—Sarah Thankam Matthews, author of All This Could Be Different


“This book is a monster: the magnificent writing, the gallery of characters, the fascinating glimpse into the right now make it stand about twenty feet tall among new books I’ve read.”
—Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, author of The Queen of Tuesday


“Anyone’s Ghost is a ferocious novel of erotic friendship, uncategorizable love, and vexed masculinity, voiced by a narrator as winning and largehearted as any character I’ve recently met. With its psychedelic prose and fierce moral intelligence, this is one of those books that makes you want to keep living. To read it is to fall more deeply in love with the world.”

—Maggie Millner, author of Couplets: A Love Story