It is perhaps not surprising, given the subject matter of Everything I Know About Love, that friendship is really the greatest love story in Ghosts. The desperation of what to do when a parent no longer can offer the stability of a parent feels devastatingly accurate, the extreme version of what many young people feel as they transition into adulthood. Her father’s story is particularly tragic and well-described, contrasting Nina’s position at the beginning of her life to her father’s at the end of his. There’s her friend, Lola, who has been single for 10 years without romantic success Katherine, her childhood friend struggling with small children and her father, who is slowly losing his mental acuity and memory. And other strands of the story are far more important than he is. But he is a little too perfect, a little too much like someone’s idea of a good ending. Nina is ready for this romance, especially as that is what everyone around her is encouraging. The big romance is set up within the first 50 pages, with the arrival of the dashing, eligible and seemingly perfect Max. But it is about far more than that, something which becomes evident early in the novel. Ghosts initially seems to be about love, an easy subject to belittle. It is, in some ways, a fluffy piece of schadenfreude, but like her characters, with their own 'schadenfreude shelf', it is comforting to read about someone who is even worse off than you. As a twenty-something single woman in London, her romantic mishaps are all too familiar, but the familiarity of humiliation can be a salve to injured pride.

Perhaps that is part of its charm – that the characters are so recognisable, and also so self-oriented. Again, that is not to say that this takes away from Ghosts. Nina is short where Alderton is tall, dark-haired where Alderton is blonde, a food writer rather than a columnist, but it is close enough to be clearly all about Alderton. Alderton has amended some details, but the bare bones are very obvious to any readers of her 2018 Everything I Know About Love. The narrator and protagonist of Ghosts, 32-year-old Nina Dean, is a very thinly veiled portrait of the author.

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