Ghosts - Softcover

Alderton, Dolly

 
9780593460245: Ghosts
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593460243 ISBN 13: 9780593460245
Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Everything I Know About Love comes a smart, sexy, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about ex-boyfriends, imperfect parents, friends with kids, and a man who disappears the moment he says "I love you."

“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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DOLLY ALDERTON is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. She is a columnist for The Sunday Times Style and has also written for GQ, Red, Marie Claire and Grazia. She is the former cohost and cocreator of the weekly pop-culture and current affairs podcast The High Low. Her first book, Everything I Know About Love, became a top-five Sunday Times best seller in its first week of publication and won a National Book Award (UK) for Autobiography of the Year. Ghosts is her first novel.
 

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One

“It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
Marcel Proust


Living in suburban North London was nothing but an act of pragmatism for my parents. Whenever I asked them why they chose to leave East London for the suburbs when I was ten, they would refer to functionality: it was a bit safer, you could buy a bit more space, it was near the city, it was near lots of motorways and close to schools. They talked about setting up their life in Pinner as if they had been looking for a hotel that was close to the airport for an early flight—convenient, anonymous, fuss-free, nothing special but it got the job done. Nothing about where my parents lived brought them any sensory pleasure or cause for relish not the land-scape, nor the history of the place, not the parks, the architecture, the community or culture. They lived in the suburbs because it was close to things. They had built their home and therefore entire life around convenience.

When we were together, Joe often used his northernness in argu-ments against me, as a way of proving he was more real than I was; more down to earth and therefore more likely to be right. It was one of my least favourite things about him—the way he lazily outsourced his integrity to Yorkshire, so that romantic implications of miners and moors would do all the hard work for him. In the early stages of our relationship, he used to make me feel like we had grown up in separate galaxies because his mum had worked as a hairdresser in Sheffield and mine was a receptionist in Harrow. The first time he took me home to his parents’ house—a modest three-bed in a sub-urb of Sheffield—I realized just what a lie I’d been told. If I hadn’t known I was in Yorkshire, I would have sworn we were driving around the pebbledash-fronted-leaded-window gap between the end of London and the beginning of Hertfordshire where I’d spent my adolescence. Joe’s cul-de- sac was the same as mine, the houses were all the same, his fridge was full of the same fruit-corner yogurts and ready-to-bake garlic bread. He’d had a bike just like mine, to spend his teenage weekends going up and down streets of identical red-roof houses just like I did. He was taken to PizzaExpress for his birthday like I was. The secret was out. “No more making out that we’ve had completely different upbringings, Joe,” I said to him on the train home. “No more pretending you belong in a song written by Jarvis Cocker about being in love with a woman in a tabard. You no more belong in that song than I belong in a Chas and Dave one. We grew up in matching suburbs.”

In recent years, I’d found myself craving the familiarity of home. The high streets I knew, with their high density of dentists, hair-dressers and bookies, and total lack of independent coffee shops. The long walk from the station to my parents’ house. The women with matching long bobs, the balding men, the teenagers in hoodies. The absence of individualism; the peaceful acquiescence to mundanity. Young adulthood had quickly turned into just plain adulthood—with its daily list of choices to confirm who I was, how I voted, who my broadband provider was—and returning to the scene of my teenage life for an afternoon felt like a brief holiday back in time. 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 pos-sibilities that were ahead of me were wide open and boundless.

Mum answered the door like she always answered the door—in a way that demonstrably made the point that her life was very busy. She did an apologetic wonky smile as she opened it to me, portable landline pressed up to her ear on her shoulder. “Sorry,” she mouthed, and rolled her eyes. She was wearing a pair of black jersey-fabric bottoms that didn’t look assertive enough to be trou-sers, weren’t tight enough to be leggings and weren’t slouchy enough to be pyjamas. She wore a grey marl round-neck T- shirt and was decorated in her base-coat of jewellery: thick gold bracelet, one gold bangle, pearl stud earrings, snake chain gold necklace, gold wedding band. My guess was she was coming from or going to some form of physical exercise—my mum had become obsessed with physical exercise since she turned fifty, but I don’t think it changed her body by even half a pound. She was wrapped in a post-menopausal layer of softness, a small bag under her chin, a thicker middle, flesh that now spilt over the back of her bra, visible through her T- shirt. And she was gorgeous. The sort of big-bovine-eyed gorgeous that is not hugely exciting but evokes familiar magnetism in everyone—like an open fire or a bunch of pink roses or a golden cocker spaniel. Her espresso-brown bob, although sliced with grey strands, was lus-ciously thick and her golden highlights shimmered under the light of the overhead IKEA lamp. I inherited almost nothing of my looks from my mother.

“Yeah, fine,” she said into the phone, beckoning me into the hall-way. “Great, well, let’s do coffee next week then. Just send me the dates. I’ll bring you that teach-yourself-Tarot kit I was telling you about. No, not at all, you can keep it actually. QVC, so easy enough. Okay, okay. Speak then, bye!” She hung up the phone and gave me a hug, before holding me at arm’s length and examining my fringe. “This is new,” she said, looking curiously at it, like it was 3 down on a crossword.

“Yes,” I said, putting down my handbag and removing my shoes (everyone had to remove their shoes on arrival, the rule was more stringent here than at the Blue Mosque). “Got it before my birthday. Thought it would be good for covering my thirty-two-year-old lines on my thirty- two- year- old forehead.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, flicking it gingerly. “You don’t need some mop on your head for that, you just need some effective foundation.”

I smiled, unoffended but unamused. I had got used to the fact that Mum was disappointed by quite how ungirly her daughter was. She would have loved a girl with whom she could have gone shopping for holiday clothes and gossiped about face primer. When we were teenagers, and Katherine came round, Mum would offer her all her old jewellery and handbags, and they’d sift through them together like two gal pals at a department store. She fell deeply in love with Lola the first time they met, purely on the basis that they both felt particularly passionate about the same face highlighter.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“Reading,” she said.

I looked through the French doors of the living room and saw the profile of my dad in his bottle-green armchair. His feet up on the foot-stool, a large mug of tea on the side table next to him. His strong chin and long nose protruding—the chin and nose that also belong to me—as if they were competing to get to the same finish line in a race

There was seventeen years’ difference in age between Mum and Dad. They had met when Dad was the deputy head of an inner-city state school and Mum was sent there by her secretarial agency to be the receptionist. She was twenty-four, he was forty-one. The gap between their personalities was as large as their age gap. Dad was sensitive, gentle, inquisitive, introspective and intellectual—there...

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Verlag
Random House Large Print
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593460243
ISBN 13 
9780593460245
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
445
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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