Ghosts
If I were to recommend one book to you to make you see and understand a world you may not be living right now - it is this one.Dolly Alderton is hilarious, observant, contemporary, brilliant. Here we meet Nina - a 30-something, unmarried, devoted daughter to a beloved declining father, long-suffering daughter of her hilariously quirky mother, and very good friend. You know … Nina! You’ll love her and Dolly Alderton is just … so spot on here. You’ll learn about the life Nina lives and the man she meets. His name is Max. He’s an accountant who looks more like a lumberjack. He’s 37, has hair that’s been tousled by the elements, is “solid as a Sequoia, high as a Redwood and as broad as the prairie.” And he grows vegetables. If you don’t know what “ghosting” is, you will - and I bet you’ve been ghosted (when someone you thought you were in a relationship groove with - friend, family, neighbor, dating interest -- stops responding in your usual patterns and doesn’t say why or what happened). But this is more than a love story, and that’s my favorite thing. Settle in here and move around in one woman’s 30-something life, specifically the great divide between single women and married women with babies. Alderton deftly shows the push and pull of these friendships and how single women can often be made to feel like they’re lesser than their reproducing counterparts. And yet … our Nina is a trooper through all; for her childhood friend Katherine, Nina treks to the suburbs, Nina plays with the babies, Nina nods and smiles when Katherine assumes that her singleton life allows her “to rise at noon and lie in a warm bath of milk and honey all day while being fanned with dodo feathers.” With her father, Nina at times feels “ghosted” as her father just begins to forget little things - oh gosh, just read it.Read it, read it. I promise you’ll talk and talk about what you’ve read. GREAT book for your book group. - Sandy
"An absolute knock-out. Wickedly funny and, at turns, both cynical and sincere... feels like your very favorite friend." --Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Malibu Rising ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, VOGUE, PEOPLE Nina Dean is not especially bothered that she's single. She owns her own apartment, she's about to publish her second book, she has a great relationship with her ex-boyfriend, and enough friends to keep her social calendar full and her hangovers plentiful. And when she downloads a dating app, she does the seemingly impossible: She meets a great guy on her first date. Max is handsome and built like a lumberjack; he has floppy blond hair and a stable job. But more surprising than anything else, Nina and Max have chemistry. Their conversations are witty and ironic, they both hate sports, they dance together like fools, they happily dig deep into the nuances of crappy music, and they create an entire universe of private jokes and chemical bliss. But when Max ghosts her, Nina is forced to deal with everything she's been trying so hard to ignore: her father's dementia is getting worse, and so is her mother's denial of it; her editor hates her new book idea; and her best friend from childhood is icing her out. Funny, tender, and eminently, movingly relatable, Ghosts is a whip-smart tale of relationships and modern life.