A 2025 Lamda Literary Award finalist • Longlisted for The Center For Fiction's 2024 First Novel Prize • Named a Best Book of 2024 by Elle , Vogue , and Debutiful “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.” “This new novel is a real heart-squeezer. Beautiful, one of a kind and perfectly titled.” —Matt Berninger, The National “A beautiful exploration of the all-encompassing nature of friendship, specifically male friendship, and the devastating speed at which grief can derail your life. Thompson paints a nuanced and understanding portrait of love and bisexuality while underlining how everything from the people you know to the music you listen to as a teenager can brand themselves indelibly on your sense of self.” — Service95 “Brilliant . . . A coming-of-age story of first love, discovery, and grief.” — American Songwriter “The unattainable boy will always be out there, but a genuinely powerful debut that succeeds solely on its merits instead of hype is a lot harder to find. Anyone’s Ghost , however, is one.” — The Irish Times “[An] electric debut novel . . . With shades of André Aciman and Donna Tartt, the book fascinates from its first sentence . . . Thompson’s hypnotic prose and addictive plot moves and exhilarates in equal measure.” — Vogue “Thompson's touching, unforgettable story follows the two across the years as their relationship changes, but their shared history continues to hold them together.” — Town and Country (best books of summer 2024) “A dazing portrait of anxious boyhood, and of equally uncertain sexual awakening . . . Thompson writes with finesse about the flood of emotion behind friends Theron and Jake . . . a gutting experience, but one with precious insight.” — Elle “A novel that shares its name with a song by The National will always stir my interest. Thompson’s debut, which has received glowing praise from literary heavyweights Jonathan Safran Foer and Junot Diaz, tracks the blurred-lines intimacy of two boys who meet as teenagers and dart in and out of one another’s lives.” — Electric Literature “Thompson's honesty about the slithery nature of forbidden love and its consequences outshines the protestations and prevarications of the two men whose lives have tumbled together, innocently enough but destined for tragedy . . . The single most remarkable aspect of this compulsively readable novel is Thompson's willingness to delve into both physical and emotional details that a lesser writer would dodge.” — Bay Area Reporter “ Anyone’s Ghost thrums with tenderness and tension . . . The writer’s debut novel interrogates grief and masculinity through a gut-wrenching tale of an all-consuming love . . . the writing is both an ode to a love that was not diminished by time—and also an elegy. Thompson proves that this kind of unrelenting nostalgia can be dynamic and even startlingly sensual . . . This oscillation between the beauty and isolation of masculinity is what makes this narrative so compelling . . . Thompson is not afraid of that emotional intensity—rather, he revels in its tension… Anyone’s Ghost establishes Thompson as a master of writing toward persistent nostalgia.” — Document Journal “It’s bursting with youthful drama complete with car crashes and confused sexuality and friendship and masculinity and rock and roll and all of it bundled up in a roili