Ghosted, Jenn Ashworth
Ghosted, Jenn Ashworth
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Ghosted
A Love Story

Author: Jenn Ashworth

Narrator: Helen Duff

Unabridged: 11 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Sceptre

Published: 06/10/2021

Synopsis

A deeply affecting and unconventional love story, shot through with anger, black humour and grief.

One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband Mark vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn't she worried?

It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie's account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts. At the time, she couldn't explain much of her behaviour herself. But as she looks back on the ensuing wreckage - the friendships broken, the wild accusations she made, the one-night stand - she can see more clearly what lay behind it. And if it's not too late, she can see how she might repair the damage and, most of all, forgive herself.

(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

About Jenn Ashworth

Jenn Ashworth is the author of the novels A Kind of Intimacy, which won a Betty Trask Award, Cold Light, The Friday Gospels, Fell and Ghosted: A Love Story, which was shortlisted for the Portico Prize. In 2011, she was featured on BBC Two's The Culture Show as one of the twelve Best New British Novelists. She has also written a memoir-in-essays, Notes Made While Falling, which was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. She lives in Lancashire and is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Southern Lady Reads (Crazy Busy-Will Catch Up!)

Sometimes there are books you read just because you needed to feel the emotions the cover was trying to portray. Ghosted is one of those. The older I get - the more I appreciate just sitting with a book, however short, and just letting it impact me. I no longer need to feel some great adventure. I d......more

Goodreads review by Eric

There may not be any actual ghosts in Jenn Ashworth's novel “Ghosted” but there are many different kinds of ghosting. The story begins when Laurie's husband Mark vanishes and she fears that he might have simply walked out of their relationship or “ghosted” her. But, alongside the complexity of this......more

Goodreads review by Ieva

“Self pity was much easier. There was a sticky pleasure in it that could be addictive” Laurie ir Markas gyvena blokinio namo viršuje. Jie tokia netradicinė ir keista pora. Ir vieną dieną Markas tiesiog dingsta. Palikęs savo telefoną, piniginę. Kai Laurie praneša policijai, pradesa lįsti keistos detal......more

Goodreads review by chantel

As far as romance goes, this hit the spot for me. Not because it was particularly romantic, but more because it was strange in the strange ways that I like. Our protagonist is her own antagonist. She's unstable, sometimes unlikeable, unreliable, and potentially murderous... her husband disappears an......more

Quotes

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 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. Guardian

Since her 2009 debut A Kind of Intimacy, Jenn Ashworth has been quietly collecting honours for her distinctive, empathetic and sharply observed novels, of which Ghosted is another . . . She writes powerfully and movingly about lives shaped by need, love and loss, as well as the solipsism of ferocious grief Daily Mail

Ghosts, buried trauma and lingering absences suffuse this darkly funny and compelling novel. Tatler

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. Daily Mirror

A brilliant 21st-century take on the Gothic: a woman, whose husband just vanishes, is left to the frantic silence of abandonment and virtual reality's eerie twilight. A seriously gifted writer surely due a big prize. Irish Times

Raw, darkly comic and moving Best

Stunning . . . Ghosted is a séance disguised as a novel. The London Magazine

Ashworth's writing is often referred to as "unnerving" and I wonder if that's because of her immense talent for honing in on our deepest fears. Northern Soul

A vivid, blackly funny and heartbreaking portrait of a marriage and the tiny and large hurts within it, how they wear at us and haunt us despite everything, but I found it beautifully hopeful too.

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