Ghost Town - by Tom Perrotta (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A gripping and darkly nostalgic tale, "Perrotta at his finest" (Ron Charles), about a tumultuous summer in 1970s suburban New Jersey, from the perspective of a middle-aged writer looking back on a series of events that changed his life--and the story he finally has the courage to tell.

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

"Perrotta, that satirist of suburbia, offers a story as potent with nostalgia as the perfect bong hit...It's a sad and sweet look at how our upbringings shape us long past when we wish to outrun them, on to a time when we hope we'll never forget them." --Los Angeles Times

"This is Perrotta at his finest, working in that cramped space between crying and laughing. ...The ending is an absolute wallop, a tragedy hidden in the grass so subtly that no adolescent could have seen it coming, and no adult could ever survive it intact." --Ron Charles

"A writer returns to his hometown for an awards ceremony and revisits the year his mother died and the tragedies that followed. Perrotta packs an emotional wallop and nails the restless ennui of adolescence during a suburban summer ca. 1973, while evoking the scent of Coppertone and cigarette smoke." --People Magazine

"The brisk, resonant Ghost Town might be Perrotta's best book. I've enjoyed all of his novels, but it feels like he has pared this one down to its essence, which is beautiful and true: how we stay connected to the people we've lost and how we learn to move on." --Chris Hewitt, Minnesota Star-Tribune

"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

One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026

"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

About the Author

Tom Perrotta is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher, which were adapted into acclaimed HBO series. His new novel is Ghost Town.