SHORTLISTED FOR THE PORTICO PRIZE 2022

'Unnerving, absorbing . . . Laurie is a miraculous creation . . . Piercingly human and darkly funny' Sunday Times

One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband disappears, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks she tells no one, carrying on her cleaning job at the university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her high-rise flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports him as missing, the police are suspicious. What took her so long?

Laurie can't fully explain her behaviour even to herself, or the strange presence she senses in the flat. Only when she looks back on the ensuing wreckage does she begin to understand, and see how she might repair the damage.

"Unnerving, absorbing . . . Ashworth's setting is a small unnamed northwestern university city . . . a clever, gripping, refreshingly urban setting for a novel that plays with tropes from not just ghost stories but also murder mysteries . . . The mentally restless Laurie is a miraculous creation, somehow managing to be both a not entirely reliable narrator and yet solidly sympathetic. Piercingly human and darkly funny, Ghosted is a tender, beautifully controlled account of expectations knocked off course" - Sunday Times

"From her debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, Ashworth's work has explored physical discomfort, violence and sexual misadventure. She writes explicitly of physicality and its often petrifying opposite - disembodiment. There are moments in Ghosted that are at once terrifying and blackly humorous . . . an impressive reminder of the uneasy silence reverberating on the other side of grief." - Guardian

"Since her 2009 debut A Kind of Intimacy, Jenn Ashworth has been quietly collecting honours for her distinctive, empathetic and sharply observed novels, of which Ghosted is another . . . She writes powerfully and movingly about lives shaped by need, love and loss, as well as the solipsism of ferocious grief" - Daily Mail

"Ghosts, buried trauma and lingering absences suffuse this darkly funny and compelling novel." - Tatler

"A revelatory portrait of a marriage. Although Laurie is acerbic and funny, this is an immeasurably sad read, aching with the unacknowledged grief of a complicated couple who have lost more than they can say." - Daily Mirror

"A brilliant 21st-century take on the Gothic: a woman, whose husband just vanishes, is left to the frantic silence of abandonment and virtual reality's eerie twilight. A seriously gifted writer surely due a big prize." - Irish Times

"Raw, darkly comic and moving" - Best

"Stunning . . . Ghosted is a séance disguised as a novel." - The London Magazine

"Ashworth's writing is often referred to as "unnerving" and I wonder if that's because of her immense talent for honing in on our deepest fears." - Northern Soul