Welcome to the luminous world of The Ghost in Love. A man falls in the snow, hits his head on a stone curb, and dies. But something strange occurs: the man doesn't die. And the ghost that's been sent to take his soul to the afterlife is flabbergasted. Going immediately to its boss, the ghost asks, What should I do now? And the boss replies, We don't know how this happened, but we're working on it; in the meantime, we want you to stay with this man to help us figure out what's going on. The ghost grudgingly agrees. It is, after all, a ghost, not a nursemaid. But a funny thing happens—the ghost falls madly in love with the man's girlfriend, and things naturally get even more complicated. Especially when the man discovers why he did not die when he was 'supposed to: because, for the first time in their history, human beings have finally decided to take their fates back from the gods. It's a wonderful change—but one that comes at a price. The Ghost in Love is about what happens to us when we discover that we have become the masters of our own fates. No excuses, no outside forces or gods to blame—the responsibility is all our own. It's also about love, ghosts that happen to be gourmet cooks, talking dogs, and picnicking in the rain with yourself at twenty different ages. At once otherworldly and deeply heartfelt, The Ghost in Love will haunt you with its breathtaking originality, its brio, and its wise soul.
Author
Jonathan Carroll (b. 1949) is an award-winning American author of modern fantasy and slipstream novels. His debut book, The Land of Laughs (1980), tells the story of a children’s author whose imagination has left the printed page and begun to influence reality. The book introduced several hallmarks of Carroll’s writing, including talking animals and worlds that straddle the thin line between reality and the surreal, a technique that has seen him compared to South American magical realists. Outside the Dog Museum (1991) was named the best novel of the year by the British Fantasy Society, and has proven to be one of Carroll’s most popular works. Since then he has written the Crane’s View trilogy, Glass Soup (2005) and, most recently, The Ghost in Love (2008). His short stories have been collected in The Panic Hand (1995) and The Woman Who Married a Cloud (2012). He continues to live and write in Vienna.
