Thank you netgalley for another amazing book. Dolly Alderton's Ghosts is another must read for 2020.
32 year old Nina Dean appears to have her life together. Her dream career is on the rise, she's bought her own flat. But not quite everything is together, family dynamics are up in the air as her father's condition deteriorates, and her love life is non-existent, until she joins a promising dating app in the hopes to get her love life on the right track. Mr perfect sweeps her off her feet, but is it too good to be true?
Follow Nina Dean through the highs and lows of internet dating, neighbourly feuds and being left behind in your social circle as everyone else seems to be progressing to the next levels of the game of life faster. I didn't know it was possible to feel heartbroken and feel good at the same time until I read this book. I couldn't put it down.

Ooooft. Such delicious descriptions and metaphors in here, I have major writer’s envy!! Unlike a lot of books that rely on an explosive plot to maintain the reader’s interest, this story drops us in the midst of Nina’s 32nd year of life and ends at her 33rd. A single year - yet some of the most compulsive reading I’ve ever experienced!

You can tell Dolly delves deep into her characters, settings and situations because everything feels so seeped in background that you feel like you’re truly living it. Despite never having used a dating app in my life, I feel like I have shared PTSD now, haha!

I loved every page of this book. I laughed and I cried, and the characters are so strong and recognisable (I swear she must know my mother). I never quite knew what direction the story was going to go in - in a fantastic way - and I’m now very impatient for my friends to read it so we can discuss it when it comes out!

Favourite quote: “Hello?” Mum barked as she picked up the landline, harried and hassled, as if I were a PPI salesman calling for the fifth time in an hour.”

Just so relatable!!!

I loved everything about this book, they way Dolly writes is so honest and real, as a fellow 32 year old, I could completely relate to Nina and the ticking time bomb pressures that society puts on you all whilst navigating how to be an adult in this day and age with work, family, dating and social media, she's the friend we all need and want. It's everything you'd expect from Dolly, beautifully written and hits all the emotions.

Much like Dolly's memoir, I raced through this book in just a few days. I was so invested in the main character from the get-go and really could not put it down. It made me laugh and cry. Her observations of online dating and life in your early thirties were spot-on while the storyline about dementia was poignant moving.

As a person now in my late 20s (the horror!) Nina really resonated with me, being the single pringle amongst an ever growing larger amount of settled friends who have almost seem to expect for you transition your behaviour to their new standards. If I dare draw comparisons Ghosts is a modern day updated take of a Bridget Jones style novel on the manic lives we live, the pressure those of us in our late 20s and 30s face in terms of expectations of others, especially us ladies (being constantly reminded my eggs are a ticking time bomb by news articles is argh!). In a way Alderton's novel whilst clearly fictional has actually made me feel relieved, that the forced expectations are this horrific standard fare and that we are all battling life in our own way.
I devoured this book pretty quickly and am looking forward to grabbing a copy for my heavily full bookshelves when it releases in October, thank you NetGalley + the publisher for allowing me to have access to an advance copy.

Being a fan of Dolly’s, when I heard she was releasing a novel I couldn’t wait to read it and I was not disappointed. Equal parts heartwarming and heartbreaking, I initially thought this was going to your typical romcom read but it was so much more than that. Very well written with a protagonist you just want the best for, and complex characters that are as infuriating as they are loveable (well... most of them anyway!). I couldn’t recommend this enough, I loved everything about it and didn’t want it to end.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for an advanced digital copy of the book in return for my honest review. This book is released in October 2020.

Having read Everything I know about Love, I was already familiar with Dolly Alderton's writing and storytelling style going into 'Ghosts', which I think made it a lot easier to get drawn into immediately.
The story is one that many of us can relate to, and even more so those of us who are female, in our 20s-30s and live in London. I tick all of those boxes, so a lot of the things described, experienced or felt by Nina and her friends are things that my own friends and I have experienced too.
I found the characters well written, not just the main character, but the supporting characters all had a depth to them that's also forgotten when it comes to secondary characters.

This was one of those stories that I stayed up far too late to finish because I just got really invested in what was happening. It's an easy read and despite dealing with some difficult topics (breakups, parenthood, Alzheimer's), manages to be light while still treating those topics with the respect they deserve.

Overall, a good read and one that'd be ideal for a rainy weekend.

I love love love Dolly Alderton & was so excited to get this book. It did not disappoint. I loved the character of Nina I felt like she was a friend & could relate to her so much. I read this book in a few hours & it is genuinely one of my favourite books of 2020.

I was SO happy to get to read this so early as I am a huge Alderton fan, Everything I Know About Love is one of my favourite ever books, and Ghosts did not disappoint. Beautifully written, funny, characters that you fall in love with/drive you insane and such a fantastic story. I cannot fault it, after staying all night to finish. Pure brilliance.

Nina Dean is a thirty-something woman of our times. She is single, a cookery book writer and the friend we’d all like to have. Nina wants to find that certain someone who could be waiting out there for her, and at the instigation of one of her best friends, joins a dating app. Far from meeting the man of her dreams, who she thinks Max is, he ‘ghosts’ her.
At the same time, most of her friends are married, getting married or having babies, her mother is making herself over (with the help of her flashy friend) , and she and her mother are coping with Nina’s father increasing dementia.
If this all sounds depressing, take heart, this book has so much humour, great characters - including the man in the flat below who plays his music very loudly late at night, and may or may not be a psychopath.
I think most of us can relate to certain aspects of this book, and I found that Nina’s way of coping with her beloved father’s dementia was so touching and real.

Wow what a book. Thank you so much to Ms Alderton for writing this fantastic novel which I honestly believe looked into my soul on several occasions.
Nina is 32, successful and independent and yet there is something missing in her life. In spite of her aspirational life as a food writer owning her own flat in London with so many fantastic and meaningful friendships, she embarks on the new and traumatic experience of online dating while simultaneously watching her father slip into dementia.
The title refers to the juxtaposition of Nina's real life experience of her father's unintentional and tragic ghosting and the cruel example of Max's juvenile ghosting. It's not a spoiler I think to point out that Max is not the nicest of men.
Nina and her single friend Lola's experiences perfectly express the pressures on women in their early thirties (I am 31 and also about as on the shelf as a Jane Austen maiden aunt). We are all expected to be everything: sexy, funny, independent, homely, easy-going, footloose and not too full on. We certainly can't express our unattractive anxieties, wishes to find a partner and a settled home life, regardless of how much we dream of husbands, babies and home comforts. These women are in an impossible position, ostracised by their married friends and struggling to find love while their female gender continues to limit the time available left to them to experience their imagined futures as mothers unlike the men depicted here.
This novel points out the gender imbalances within society and relationships and how at heart we are all homesick for our own childhoods. I can't tell you how many times I've cried, saying "I want to go home" just like Nina and home is never the location I now live, but the memory of my childhood.
Thank you so much Ms Alderton for writing this novel, I honestly can't put into words what it has meant to me.

Dolly Alderton has a very strong style and this book feels quite autobiographical in a way.
Nina is a food writer who is trying to meet a man through online dating. The book is a romance novel in a way but it is also about family, female friendship and navigating your thirties..Nina wants to settle down and have children but she also wants to have fun with her friends and have her independence.
The relationship between NIna and her dad is touching as he has dementia, She uses food to jog his memories and to reassure him. I found these parts quite realistic and was well researched.
An easy but interesting book good for a holiday read.

4.5 🌟
I thoroughly enjoy Dolly Alderton’s writing and hope this is the first of many novels to come.

Ghosts is the tale of 32 year old Nina: single, successful and self-assured. I found her character so relatable as a 30-something singleton, also one of the last amongst my friendship group of mostly married couples with children.

Every single woman of this era will have experienced something similar to both Nina and Lola, such an accurate, funny and, at times, devastating account of online dating.

Alongside the tale of friendship, work and love, was also that of family dynamics and the tragic decline of Nina’s Dad to dementia. The way Dolly Alderton writes about memory is veracious: “It’s so hard to trace which memories are yours and which ones you’ve borrowed from photo albums and family folklore and appropriated as your own.”

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin/Fig Tree for this early proof copy.

Good in parts.
Some of this book is very funny, some of it is rather hackneyed (Bridget Jones meets Fleabag) and some of it is just bewildering.
There are some very touching descriptions of Nina trying to cope with her father's descent into dementia, but a lot of the time I found Nina and her friends rather irritating.
Perhaps a 30-something reader would enjoy it more...

Ghosts is a great read which I can imagine would be perfect to take on holiday and read on the beach. It’s an easy debut novel which you can dip in and of and not get overwhelmed with.

Ghosts is about Nina, who is in her early thirties and is trying to work out online dating. She is the ‘single’ friend. She doesn’t have children, isn’t married and her friends identify her by that, even though she is so much more. Nina is a powerful woman, she’s an author, she writes newspaper columns, has her own flat, is independent and overall enjoys being single.

Ghosts is essentially about being ghosted, not only ghosted by men she builds relationships with on dating apps, but about how her friendships fizzle out, and her relationship with her parents is reshaping as they age. Everything is changing and Nina is trying to keep up, the last thing she needs is to be ghosted by men on the dating app Linx.

Alderton covers topics of dementia, heartbreak, friendship and seeing her ex-partner of 7 years marrying someone new – and going to their wedding, in such a comical and sensitive way that makes you empathise with Nina. I think this is relatable book for almost anyone who has used dating apps and Max, one of the men Nina meets on her app, is a character that we probably all know too well.

Overall, I found this a really enjoyable read, I went into it with high hopes and was not left disappointed. I loved how the characters weren’t perfect, their lives were all so different and they all had their own problems to sort out. This was a really engaging, light read with lots of emotion and heartfelt moments.

I raced through this book. It is thoroughly enjoyable despite showing some frustrating, immature and downright cruel behaviour from the men in the book. (But not all of them - Nina’s dad being a lovely exception.) Dolly Alderton has some sharp insights into how friendships change as people age, pair off and have babies and she also writes beautifully about childhood, and the role shared memories play in all our relationships. She manages to write about love and the hopeful attempts to find a relationship online without resorting to cliché. A pleasure to read.

At first I couldn't get Dolly out of my head, even though the character has a completely different name etc, the similarities to herself throughout kept that in my mind. However, after getting over that initial thought I fell in love with this book and of course Dolly's flawless writing. 100% recommendation from me!

Dolly Alderton’s fiction debut is sharp, realistic and poignant and I found it far more enjoyable than her astronomically successful memoir!
Nina Dean is a food writer whose friends are slowly becoming strangers and whose father is slowly but surely succumbing to dementia. On the eve of her 32nd birthday, she decides it’s time to look for love online following the breakdown of her one and only relationship. ‘Ghosts’ follows her over the course of a year, and sees her reevaluate all the most important relationships in her life.
The storyline involving her father is by far the best written and most engaging. Alderton is excellent at writing about his loss of self, and captures heartbreakingly well the grief that Nina feels watching him disappear even as he stands before her. There are no easy solutions offered, but there are moments of light and humour which I felt really authentically reflected the reality of the situation.
Interestingly, for someone whose debut memoir focused overwhelmingly on her female friendships, I didn’t think that Alderton did a terribly good job of writing about Nina’s friends, most of whom come across as selfish and dull and not really worth Nina’s time. She is also most definitely not a good writer, and so the passages where Nina writes about food were a little cringey.
I would say this is worth reading purely for the storyline about Nina’s dad, although I think a lot of people will relate to Nina’s experience of online dating!
Thanks to penguin and Netgalley for the ARC.

Nina is in her early thirties, a successful food writer living in London. She’s got just one single friend left, Lola, and everyone else is married and starting families. She caves to pressure and downloads a dating app called Linx. The line-up of potential mates is uninspiring to say the least – as Nina remarks dryly, ‘Every man looked exactly the same: ‘Tom, 24, atheist, London, likes: reading, sleeping, eating travel’ – it reminded me of the Biology GCSE syllabus and being taught what living organisms need: ‘movement, respiration, reproduction, nutrition, excretion.’

But it’s not too long before she meets the charming and beguiling Max, an accountant (a job he hates) with a love of the outdoors and a yearning to see the world (yawn?). They hit it off, and things are going swimmingly. Until – not a spoiler – he vanishes.

‘Max wanted to be tortured, he wanted to yearn and chase and dream. He wanted to exist in a liminal state, like everything was just about to begin.’

So this is a story about being ghosted in the modern, dating sense, the term that appeared to give a name to that depressing phenomenon of potential or current dates disappearing off the face of the earth with no explanation. But it’s not just about that: the ghosts here are also the slowly vanishing friendships, once held dear but splintered by a move to the suburbs, screaming toddlers and a picture-perfect Instagram life. Nina struggles to connect with her best friend who’s determined to act like someone who has it all, while similarly seeing Nina’s life choices as a direct attack on her own.

The ghosts are also those of the past, made even more astute by the fact that Nina’s father is suffering from Dementia. As she watches him slowly grow more distanced from the person he was, she grapples with the feelings of responsibility, loss and sadness, amidst a fracturing relationship with her mum. There are tender and insightful layers of nostalgia as Nina returns to the place she grew up, the air thick with memory.

‘When I was in Pinner, I could be seventeen again, just for a day. I could pretend that my world was myopic and my choices meaningless and the possibilities that were ahead of me were wide open and boundless.’

‘They arrive in their new navy car. It’s already been fitted with a seat for the baby. One day that baby will sit on a bench, wondering if that navy car is scrap metal somewhere, wishing it could come collect them.’

Dolly Alderton’s debut novel is heartfelt, relatable and true. It’s also funny in that witty and astute way that anyone who has read Dolly’s autobiography, Everything I Know About Love, or listened to The High Low podcast will know well.

‘You just have to trust me when I say: you shall not pass.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You shall not pass,’ she repeated sagely, giving me a gentle smile.
‘Pass where?’
‘It’s a phrase my mum always used to say to me when I was sad. It means: this will end at some point, then you’ll be happy again.’
‘This too shall pass.’
‘Yes, exactly, it will.’
‘No, that’s what you’re meant to say.’
‘Is it? Why do I know the proverb “you shall not pass”?’
‘It’s not a proverb, it’s what Gandalf says in Lord of the Rings.’

It's a totally absorbing read, one that will particularly resonate with anyone in their twenties or thirties going through similar transitions. But it's also lovely in its universality and the themes of steadfast friendship, courage, change and hope.

****

With thanks to the publisher for the advanced copy. Ghosts will be published in October 2020.

This would not normally be my sort of thing, however every so often a contemporary woman's fiction type story will grab me and grab me hard. Ghosts was just such a book. Funny, wise and sharp, exploring perspectives on being female and how the world sees you. Highly recommend.