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Jason Arnopp’s creepily entertaining Ghoster

 

ghoster

 

noun

  • A person who ends a relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.”

 

This is a year of original fiction and it’s a huge pleasure to review yet another novel that fits into this category, Jason Arnopp’s Ghoster. Funny, engaging, creepy, twisted, I could throw all kinds of adjectives at it – essentially it’s just a bloody good read.

The premise is young woman (Kate) meets dream man (Scott) on Tinder, falls ‘balls-deep’ in love, agrees to move in with him, only to arrive to find all signs of him gone, but for his smartphone. And who can resist someone else’s phone? Obviously not Kate who’s obsessed by them. Thereafter the fun begins. Where’s Scott? What’s happened to him? And what’s with the weird noises and strange occurrences?

An indictment on the culture we live in, where phones are gods and social media, Apps, the net rule our lives, Ghoster engages us right from the start. Kate is a great protagonist, drawing us in with her pithy, whiny, funny and sometimes insightful views on Scott, life and the world. And Arnopp’s writing is extremely filmic. Certainly, it’s easy to imagine this being turned into a movie or Netflix special.

It’s great fun. Read it.

 

 

Jason Arnopp | Ghoster | Orbit Books | paperback | 24 October 2019 | other editions available

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Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers and to the publisher for sending a review copy and jacket image. All opinions are our own. All rights reserved. Please check out the other books on this virtual book tour. ‘Ghoster’ definition, Oxford Lexico.

See also: Carver’s Nothing Important Happened Today’; ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’; ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised‘; ‘We should all be feminists‘; The not-so-invisible woman: 150 greats in their own words’;Permission by Saskia Vogel‘; ‘Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, Dialogue’s brilliant debut; ‘RW Kwon’s The Incendiaries’; ‘How Penguin learned to fly – Allen Lane and the Original “Penguin Ten”‘; Dorothy L. Sayer’s Busman’s Holiday – Romek Marber for Penguin Crime (book covers we love).

Select Q&As/interviews: Amanda Saint‘;‘Ausma Zehanat Khan’; Mary Balogh‘; ‘Louise Voss’; ‘Lilja Sigurðardóttir’; ’Tom Cox’; ‘Vanda Symon; ‘Gunnar Staalesen’; Some like it hot – the joy of Carole Mortimer, award-winning novelist

 

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