Ghost Town - by Tom Perrotta (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Jimmy Perrini lives in 1970s suburban New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan, but a world apart. At the end of eighth grade, after tragedy strikes, Jimmy finds himself lost in a fog of grief that alienates him from friends and family, drifting instead into troubling friendships with two older teenagers: one a notorious local burnout with a fast car, an endless supply of weed, and a shaky grasp of reality; the other a smart, eccentric girl, whom Jimmy finds himself drawn to as they become entranced by her Ouija board, which may just offer the only salve to their grief.

As a fateful public drama unfolds, Jimmy is torn between the occult beyond and the cold realities of the place he has called home. Narrated by a much older Jimmy, a literary-turned-commercial novelist, Ghost Town is an "emotional wallop [that] nails the restless ennui of adolescence" (People), revealing how the past haunts the present and the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we've left them behind.

Review Quotes

"Tom Perrotta rouses the sleeping dogs of 1970s suburbia with tender complexity. Ghost Town is a time capsule dug up behind the old high school--an artifact of a family navigating loss in a nation at the crossroads." --Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

"To readers who have not yet had the pleasure of reading Tom Perrotta's books, Ghost Town is a beautiful introduction. If Perrotta has written grief before, though, as in The Leftovers, he has never written it like this--as pure and clean as a wish, or a prayer. I wept, because I understood. If you have lost someone you love, you will, too." --Emma Straub, author of This Time Tomorrow

"Ghost Town is a brilliant, evocative novel, at once a page-turning ghost story, and a deeply moving exploration of grief. Tom Perrotta's characters are people you know instantly, and the town he's created feels like the place you grew up. I couldn't put it down and after finishing it, I couldn't escape the haunting nostalgia of my own memories." --Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

"Ghost Town is a glorious piece of Americana (not to mention New Jerseyana), a wonderful snapshot of a time and place and one of the best renditions of childhood in recent memory. Tom Perrotta just keeps getting better." --Gary Shteyngart, author of Vera, or Faith

"I love the sense of constant presence and interplay of time/timelessness in Tom Perrotta's gorgeous new novel. Ghost Town is a wise, funny, bittersweet testament to the fact that ghosts live in us and with us, always." --Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch

"Ghost Town [is] moving, evocative, wise and funny." --Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Romantic Comedy

"Stellar...Perrotta is a confident storyteller, and he packs a great deal of heart into this tale of moving forward amid crushing grief, in which a writer finally gets a chance to exorcise 'the demons you think you've outrun.' This is sure to resonate with Perrotta's longtime fans and win him new ones." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review

"An atmospheric elegy to innocence lost... melancholy, moving, dark, redolent with regret and loss. His sharp characterizations and social observations serve to bemuse rather than amuse this time, but as he builds to a shocking climax, it turns out he's just as good at that." --Kirkus Reviews

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