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
“It’s rare to encounter a novel as wholly original and moving as No Ghosts, an uncanny venture into a world slightly tilted – a world where darkness is never far out of the frame, but where hope and love, too, underpin everything. Lury’s writing is vivid and fresh, and by the end I was holding my breath, totally enraptured by the journey the novel had taken me on.”
Sophie Mackintosh
“No Ghosts is a subtle, strange, substantial novel about friendship haunted by loss. It captures the uncanniness of contemporary life in a way I’ve never read before.”
Caleb Klaces
“Max Lury’s novel stands at the edge of a new fiction born of our new age and also of our as-yet-undefined Resistance to it: observant and sweeping, viewed from on high and from down in the dust of our neediest interactions, where the clash of technology is interspersed with our most intimate whispers.”
Steve Erickson
“No Ghosts is a novel so contemporary that it borders on prescience. With sharp dialogue and compelling characters, Lury meticulously crafts a mystery that explores what happens when grief, humanity, and technology converge. Chilling and dark. A truly haunting debut.”
Erin E. Adams
“Tender, uncanny, and haunting. Ambitious and perfectly observed, this is a surreal investigation into the strangeness of loving and the horror of losing love.”
Katie Buckley
“No Ghosts is so sharply attentive to gesture, texture, the emotional weather, it might be read as an exemplary realist novel, yet this is a reality haunted by the logic of dreams, the presence of the unseen, the ghosts in our machines. As disturbing as it is beguiling, it describes a world defined by AI and the afterlife, where nothing is quite as it seems.”
Andrew Cowan
“[A] superb debut novel. It trembles with dread and wit and longing and feeling. It’s vivid and startling, and its characters live and breathe and suffer right off the page. There’s undercurrents of Delillo and Richard Powers there, and also Mike McCormack, but for the 21st century’s emergent technologies and existential crises rather than the 20th’s. It feels to me like a keen and powerful exploration of what it is like to exist alongside AI and big tech, in the 21st century’s new and increasingly alien reality. At the same time it feels like a hauntological ode to friendship, to the objects and hyperobjects of our world, to memory and the thrill of being. It’s utterly compelling.”
Danny Denton
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.