Ghost Town

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 lifeand 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 weve left them behind.

Pages: 288, Hardcover, Scribner Book Company