No Ghosts - Max Lury (light wear)

No Ghosts by Max Lury / 304-page paperback published in 2026 by Peninsula Press / ISBN 9781913512811 *** 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 dramatizes 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 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