Ghost Town

By: Tom Perrotta

Published by Scribner, 2026-04-28

<b><b>From <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author Tom Perrotta, hailed by critics as “the Steinbeck of Suburbia” (<i>Time</i>), “our Balzac of the burbs” (<i>Chicago Sun-Times</i>), and “an American Chekhov” (<i>The New York Times</i>), comes a gripping and darkly nostalgic tale 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 life—and the story he finally has the courage to tell.</b></b><br><br>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.<br> <br>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, <i>Ghost Town</i> reveals how the past haunts the present—the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we’ve left them behind.