From New York Times bestselling author Tom Perrotta 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.

From New York Times bestselling author Tom Perrotta 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.

From New York Times bestselling author Tom Perrotta, hailed by critics as “the Steinbeck of Suburbia” (Time), “our Balzac of the burbs” (Chicago Sun-Times), and “an American Chekhov” (The New York Times), 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.

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 is a notorious local burnout with a fast car, an endless supply of weed, and a shaky grasp of reality. The other is a smart, eccentric girl, to whom Jimmy finds himself drawn as they become entranced by her Ouija board, which just may 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 reveals how the past haunts the present --- the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we’ve left them behind.