Ghosts

Nina Dean is a successful food writer in her early thirties who has bought her own flat, published a beloved book, and settled into a life that looks, from the outside, entirely put together. Then she meets Max on a dating app, and for a few months everything feels like the real thing, until he stops answering her messages and disappears. Around the same time, her father slips deeper into dementia, her oldest friend retreats into new motherhood, and the neighborhood she grew up in stops feeling like home. Alderton follows Nina through a year of small losses and quiet reckonings, tracing how a woman built for certainty learns to sit with the disappearances she cannot explain, in a sharp, warm study of friendship, family, and the loneliness of being ghosted.