Jenn Ashworth – Ghosted

Description

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.

‘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’ Patricia Nicol, Sunday Times

‘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’ Catherine Taylor ― Guardian

‘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’ Eithne Farry, Daily Mirror

About the Author

Jenn Ashworth’s first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask Award. On the publication of her second, Cold Light (Sceptre, 2011) she was featured on the BBC’s The Culture Show as one of the UK’s twelve best new writers. In 2019 she published a memoir-in-essays, Notes Made While Falling which was a New Statesman Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her latest novel is Ghosted: A Love Story. She lives in Lancashire and is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University.