Ghosts is Dolly Alderton’s first novel, following the wild success of her book Everything I Know About Love. Nina George Dean has never dated. After her first long term relationship broke down, she took a break from romance to concentrate on her career. She’s a successful food writer, her 2nd book is about to be released and she’s bought her first flat. So when she turns 32 she decides it’s time to dating and joins Linx, a dating app.

I enjoyed this book, I devoured it in one day! I liked Nina, I wasn’t sure if I would connect to her but I found her easy to relate to. Ghosts is a great title for the book, as not only is there the ghosting storyline, but with Nina’s Dad’s dementia, we see him fading and hold onto the ghosts of his past. Nina is also struggling with her friendship circle, specifically with how they fit into each other’s lives, something that happens naturally when we get older and start to settle down. I really liked Dolly’s depiction of friendships, especially with Lola. Dolly’s way with words and observations were so spot on, from the poignant (‘I had never known a feeling as unbearable- as sour, wrenching and unshakeably sad- as pity for a parent’) to the beautiful (‘we walked further north, on winding paths and through woodlands scattered with sunset slices through gaps of branches’) and the funny (hen party) to the infuriating (how the men behave in this). This book was just what I needed to read right now. A heartfelt, humorous debut novel

I loved this book! Sharp, well-written, witty and insightful, as you'd expect from the Queen of Podcasts. Very thoughtful about modern relationships and one of my favourite contemporary fiction reads during lockdown.

Ghosts is a very funny, relatable and entertaining read from journalist, author and – as I ‘know’ her best – co-host of the fab podcast The High Low: Dolly Alderton.

This book is fiction but you can hear Dolly’s voice strongly in so much of the story. The main character, Nina, is a likeable and strong female character who I immediately warmed to. She’s independent and fun, and I really identified with her, especially as she’s a similar age to me, living in London.

The title of Ghosts gives away part of the story, in that we can guess what will happen in part of the story, but this theme can actually be applied to lots of different relationships like Nina’s friends and family too. Her father's battle with dementia is also really interesting; I used to work for Dementia UK who provide Admiral Nurses so it was great that Nina's family got the support of one. I hope this will help highlight how brilliant they are.

I loved reading about her memories of Mile End – which is close to where I currently live – and her relationships with school friends (and the fact we might not have picked our close friends if we’d met them today, not at school).

The ending to Ghosts was, I felt, just right and Dolly skilfully avoided it being too cliched or cheesy.

This is a fun, entertaining read and I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking for an intelligent and observant read with a strong female lead.

This story is about a thirty-something woman who is “looking for love”. There are moments where the observations about life are very relatable but it is full of cliches & stereotypes and as such, I didn’t really warm to the characters or the storyline.
I felt that the ending was lacking – it just fizzled out without a definite conclusion
Overall, I am sure it will appeal to the late-twenties/early-thirties market who are immersed in the world of internet/app dating, but for me it was just too superficial, too formulaic & too similar to other stories …

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book free from the publisher via NetGalley. Whilst thanks go to the publisher for the opportunity to read it, all opinions are my own.
#NetGalley

Thank you to Penguin and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Ghosts is an entertaining and nuanced exploration of modern love, friendships and family. Alderton's eagerly-awaited first novel follows Nina Dean, a woman in her thirties who decides it's time to try out online dating, in the form of a Tinder-esque dating app called Linx. The story unfolds over the course of a year, which Nina describes as the 'strangest of her life'. Written in Alderton's modern and relatable style, the reader is quickly drawn into Nina's world. After a whirlwind romance with the beguiling Max, Nina finds that she has been 'ghosted' - Max has unmatched her, refuses to answer her messages, and is nowhere to be found. Alderton writes romance beautifully and succeeds in creating a convincing portrayal of their relationship, so that the reader is almost as surprised as Nina at Max's sudden disappearance.

Aside from the romance, the most interesting part of the novel is Alderton's portrayal of Nina's relationship with her parents, particularly her dad who is battling dementia. I thought Ghosts explored dementia in a thought-provoking way, not sugarcoating the illness but still showing the moments of light and happiness alongside the struggles.

As well as the emotional depiction of her dad's deteriorating health, there are also laugh-out-loud moments scattered through Ghosts. A particular highlight for me was Nina and Lola attending the hen-do from hell.

Ghosts is an impressive novel written in Alderton's signature style, which I'm sure many women in their twenties and thirties will find relatable.

Thank you to Netgalley for my arc of this book!

I have never read a Dolly Alderton book and as a 'Judge a book by its cover' person, it was the beautiful cover that made me want to read this book!
And I can honestly say I LOVED it!

From the first pages I completely fell in love with Nina! Her friendships with both Lola and Katherine are totally different but both totally needed to help her understand other people's lives and her own experiences.

Reading this has totally put me off ever having to do online dating and luckily I'm not in a position where I have to, lucky for me!
It made me laugh and also made me want to cry, it's a story of what happens in peoples lives but I just loved Nina and her life!

One of my favourite reads and would definitely recommend it for a feel good, emotional read!

I had high hopes for this book going in, despite never having read anything from @dollyalderton previously.⁣
It did not disappoint and I can’t quite believe his is her first novel...... a fantastic debut! ⁣
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We are introduced to Nina, our main character, a successful food writer in her early thirties, who together with her best friend Lola, are perilously navigating the world that is dating in the twenty first century! ⁣
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There were so many laugh out loud moments for me in this book, although I have to be honest it did leave me feeling pretty thankful I’m no longer in the ‘dating game’ myself having been happily married for almost 10 years. I really don’t think I could cope with being ghosted.... what an awful concept that is! ⁣
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I really enjoyed the different time line aspects to the book and the loved the story of why Nina has the middle name George! The 80’s and 90’s references were such a lovely nostalgic throwback for me and had me reminiscing about my childhood! ⁣
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I thought the themes of ageing parents and friendships as you get older were really well written and both funny and sad in equal measures.⁣
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I have to admit I was left feeling a little disappointed in the ending as I’m a sucker for happy endings, so this just missed the mark for me, but that’s a personal preference. ⁣
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Overall a really great, funny, relatable read that will not fail to make you laugh out loud! ⁣
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A fun, funny but emotional story looking at all manner of relationships. For a book mostly centred on romantic love I really liked how other forms of love were also explored and woven into the story including familial love, friendships and loving yourself. I read this quickly as I adored the character of Nina and wanted to keep going along with her seeing things from her view. I am looking forward to more novels from Dolly.

Rating 3.5/5

I haven’t read any of Dolly Alderton’s writing before but since the start of the year I have been listening to a podcast that she hosts called The High Low. Of course, when Ghosts popped up I was really interested in reading it, to see if the witty and sharp insights that I’ve heard from her would translate into her fiction.

It most definitely did, Ghosts is full of intelligent observations on a range of topics that are very relatable. I love the way the different relationships were explored, it wasn’t just about Nina’s dating life, it was a look at female friendships and how complex they can be as priorities change, which I really loved because of how honest the interactions felt between the characters even when the relationships were under stress.

Familial relationships are another focus, how these evolve over the years from childhood to adulthood but also how difficult these can be when an illness changes the dynamic. I thought the authors handling of Nina’s father's dementia and her mother’s reactions to the situation was perfect, it struck the right balance of being sensitive to the situation but also acknowledging the struggles of it.

For the first half of the book I liked that there were the more lighthearted and often funny aspects of Nina and Lola’s dating life that were set against the more serious issues of the book and the juxtaposition of that worked well.

However as the book continued I started to feel immeasurably bleak, as someone who is in a similar situation to Nina, single in their early thirties with friends all at different life stages, I wonder if maybe being so close to that situation kind of skewered the reading experience. I didn’t feel the reclamation of power and hope that I had thought I would feel, I think the end was supposed to give that feeling of female solidarity and I just didn’t get it.

There are many things that I enjoyed about this book, it has clever writing and relatable characters and whilst it didn’t leave me with the kind of reading experience that I hoped for I do think that Ghosts will hit the right note for many people.

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

At the start of the novel we meet a successful food writer, Nina, on her 32nd Birthday. We follow her for a year and experience her life and relationships with family, friends and partners. The novel is a fantastic insight into so many aspects of modern life - dating, single life, parenting, weddings, aging parents to name just a few - and all are treated with refreshing honesty and often humour. Funny and moving - highly recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin for an ARC of this book.

Dolly Alderton strikes again - a fantastic, real and extremely relatable depiction of what it is like to date, and live, a s a thirty-something woman in London today! I will be wholeheartedly recommending to all my friends. Dolly is a writer for our times, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

This was a long anticipated book for me. After falling in love with 'Everything I Know About Love' the book that made me realise not all non-fiction is so bad, I was thrilled to hear Dolly was writing a work of fiction too.

I wanted to love everything about this book, and I there were certainly aspects that I adored. Dolly has a signature warmth to her writing, a truthful hilarity that pulls you in immediately and that shined through here in 'Ghosts'. Nina had some really strong qualities and I'm sure there isn't a woman out there under forty who hasn't had to live through the hideousness that is navigating dating apps, so following Nina through her expades was a relatable experience. The way she loses her friends to marriage and children, and questions whether the friends we've had all our lives would still be our friends if we met them afresh today hit home. But, sadly for me this is where I lost the story.

I really wanted to find myself cheering on Nina as she explores living in London in her thirties in a way that most of us are - not being able to afford to buy a house, still navigating housemates and whether we'll ever be able to afford to live alone. There was something disconnected here, to have a heroine who had her own flat, who fell for the first man she met on app (though of course this has its moments) but it all felt a little too convenient. There were also moments where the writing felt as though there were observations being made for the sake of it, to put words on the page and have these deep and meaningful moments rather than pulling the plot along.

Her mother also lacked the depth I wanted to see, she was a bit of a caricature for me and felt more like a tool to get us to sympathise with Nina.

The relationship between Nina and her father though was incredibly well written and really pulled at my heart-strings, This was one of my favourite threads of the story and really heightened the strength of the book.

Dolly is a talent for sure, and I don't know whether it was my own incredibly high expectations that this book didn't live up to, but it was lacking the honesty and relatability that 'Everything I Know About Love' had for me.

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton is a phenomenal book. I wasn't sure what I expected but it definitely exceeded those expectations. The character of Nina was one I absolutely adored and it was a pleasure to spend 300+ pages with her. I related so much to her with her sense of humour and throughout the book I just kept thinking how much I would love to have a friend like her. The story is eye-opening when it comes to womanhood and friendship. It's just brilliant and I've already told countless people to go and buy it.

4,5 star read. A relevant and well-connected story of millennial dating and millennial issues we all face from family illness, loss, heartbreak and changing friendships. Highly reflective and enjoyable.

I have a real soft spot for novels featuring smart, sassy millennial women, navigating the gauntlet that is the modern world. These women are me and I am them, so they always manage to bury their way into my heart. Dolly Alderton is one of these women, so I was delighted when I heard that she’d written a novel.

Nina Dean is 32, a successful food writer with a lovely London flat and a great group of friends. However, there is so much in her life that appears to not be so happy. Her wonderful, witty, beloved father’s mind is deteriorating, her mother doesn’t seem to be coping (or even acknowledging that anything is wrong), all of her friends seem to be becoming real adults with new lives that she can’t relate to and her first foray into dating apps ends in her a horrifically brutal ghosting.

Nina (and therefore, Alderton) is a wizard at social observations. She has a talent for analysing human behaviour and her conclusions are always amusing and relatable. She has a pretty cynical attitude to dating apps, which is highly believable because I know that they’re really not fun places to be, when you’re a woman who dates men. However, they do provide a unique anthropological opportunity and in some ways, I think this is what Nina is really doing as she’s swiping.

When she meets a handsome, although flighty, guy called Max, Nina drops her guard and lets him in. By the end of her journey with him, she has come such a long way and realised so much about herself. At 32, she is still learning the realities of love and it goes to show that perhaps we can never really know everything. There is always room to be surprised, no matter how many relationships and heartbreaks you go through.

Nina’s father’s story brought tears to my eyes on multiple occasions. He was a fantastic, inspirational, English professor and glimpses of this man sometimes shine through the fog of dementia. Nina absolutely adores him and the tender, gentle way she talks to him is so beautiful to watch. Due to her dad’s condition, Nina makes regular trips back to her parents’ house and during them, she often descends into nostalgia. She seems to realise that she is at a kind of crossroads and this leads her to reflect on her childhood, her relationship with each of her parents, all of the big life decisions she has ever made and how her life has come to where it is. It makes the book almost read like a memoir in some places, which I don’t think I’ve ever felt as strongly in a novel as I did with this one.

Olive is Nina’s friend Katherine’s toddler and Nina has this reflection, after Olive has a tantrum. There are so many celebrations of women and their strength in this book. I was pondering these exact questions as Nina was and trying to figure out where and when girls learn to pick themselves up unaided, because of course, we do all the time. We often don’t have a choice but to do so. It’s a subtle comment on how women are raised and treated by adult society -we are so often on our own.

One of my favourite aspects of Ghosts was the glorious relationship between Nina and Lola, her only fellow single friend. Unlike her friendship with Katherine, I never doubted for a second that Nina and Lola’s bond would break. They seem to have an unbreakable sisterhood that is so lovely to watch. Their conversations always include hilarious anecdotes and I laughed out loud at several of Lola’s comments.

Ghosts touches on so many forms of spectral energy. Of course, the recent cyber phenomenon of ‘ghosting’ features but it’s also about a lingering of the past, a loss of what used to be and how holding on to memories doesn’t always have to lead to sadness. Remembering what used to make us happy can teach us so much about the adults that we’ve become, which in turn can help us to deal with the terrors of what it means to be grown up. The ending wasn’t what I expected it to be but it was the ending that I often hope for in rom-coms. I have to thank Alderton for that because I suspect it’s possibly the kind of ending she always wishes for too.

This was a delightful read!

An eye-opening glimpse into the world of modern dating which left me feeling all the highs and lows along with Nina and Lola. The author did really well to capture the friendships, relationships and family connections and kept me captivated throughout.

Ghosts is about Nina Dean a food writer looking for love whilst navigating friendships and family issues.

I loved her relationship with her best friend Katherine, I loved the discussion of dating apps, I thought the created world felt very real and absorbing and easy to spend time in. I laughed out loud several times, which I rarely do with books. Ghosts was definitely entertaining, however, I felt like the whole 'men are rubbish' thread was too far. It just didn't feel realistic to me.

I liked all of the characters – they were well thought out and most crucially for me, distinct from one another.

Actually found this book about the trials of on line dating sad and depressing. I discovered the meaning of the word Ghosting and how hurtful it is and the effect is has on another person. Sad about the desperate feelings of loneliness and hurt.

I related so much to Nina. I loved the feel of this book, how contemporary and relevant it was. Dolly is a great writer and I'm so glad she's branched out into the realms of fiction as well.

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton is about relationships.  Nina is a food writer, has a column in a paper, published one part cook book part memoir, and has her second book coming out soon.  She has good friends, loves her dad and has an ok relationship with her mother.  And then she meets Max on a dating app, and they hit it off.

But, life isn't all that it seems.  Nina feels disconnected with her oldest friend.  Her father has been diagnosed with dementia, and it's showing.  Her mother seems obsessed with socialising, and groups that alliterate. 

  This is a powerful read, with relationships of all sorts examined.  There are moments of joy, confusion, horror and sadness.  It's a very good book, and one that makes you think about 

 Ghosts  by Dolly Alderton was published on 15th October 2020, and you can buy it from  Amazon ,  Waterstones  and your  local independent bookshop .

You can follow Dolly Alderton on  Twitter ,  Instagram  and her  website .

I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley, and to  Fig Tree, Penguin .