by Max Lury
published 16 April
Kieran and Harlow’s best friend Annie disappeared a year ago. And now, so have the ghosts.
After being reunited at Annie’s memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead – faces, gestures, glances – in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts.
The friends’ journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie’s – and the ghosts’ – disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface.
No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives, and marks the arrival of a major new literary novelist.
‘In Max Lury’s No Ghosts, astringent comic realism is twinned with an eerie plot about Big Tech’s power to reframe death.’ Anthony Cummins, New Statesman, ‘The best fiction to read this year’
‘No Ghosts is not only incisive but prescient on our increasing immersion in an unstable, tech-augmented reality. But what makes this a really great novel is Lury’s astute social observations – his flawless ear for dialogue and radar for subtext that really nail a generational zeitgeist and the conditions it exists within. And how it seeps into work, love, death and memorial. His prose somehow manages to be coolly detached and precise while also being full of soul – and it’s a defiant, resilient kind of soul, however damaged and embattled. An unmissable debut.’ Luke Kennard
MAX LURY is a British writer based in London. He received the 2022 Curtis Brown Prize whilst studying creative writing at UEA, and is the winner of the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize 2024. No Ghosts is his debut novel.