15/4/26, from 18.30
Please note that this event will be taking place at THE RUSSIAN CLUB STUDIOS, at 340-344 Kingsland Rd, London E8 4DA, a two minute walk from the shop. We will email ticket holders with more details before the event
Please join Peninsula Press for the launch of NO GHOSTS, a debut novel from Max Lury.
There will be drinks, and Max will be in conversation with Ben Pester.
‘In Max Lury’s No Ghosts, astringent comic realism is twinned with an eerie plot about Big Tech’s power to reframe death.’ Anthony Cummins, New Statesman, ‘The best fiction to read this year’
“It’s rare to encounter a novel as wholly original and moving as No Ghosts, an uncanny venture into a world slightly tilted – a world where darkness is never far out of the frame, but where hope and love, too, underpin everything. Lury’s writing is vivid and fresh, and by the end I was holding my breath, totally enraptured by the journey the novel had taken me on.”
Sophie Mackintosh
Kieran and Harlow’s best friend Annie disappeared a year ago. And now, so have the ghosts.
After being reunited at Annie’s memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead – faces, gestures, glances – in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts.
The friends’ journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie’s – and the ghosts’ – disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface.
NO GHOSTS is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives, and marks the arrival of a major new literary novelist.
MAX LURY is a British writer based in London. He received the 2022 Curtis Brown Prize whilst studying creative writing at UEA, and is the winner of the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize 2024. NO GHOSTS is his debut novel.
BEN PESTER is a writer of long and short form fiction. His debut novel The Expansion Project (Granta, 2025) was shortlisted for the Nero Prize for Debut Fiction and the Goldsmiths Prize. His story collection Am I in the Right Place? (Boiler House Press 2021) was long listed for the 2022 Edge Hill Prize. His fiction and work has appeared in Granta, The London Magazine, TANK, Hotel, Five Dials and elsewhere. He lives with his family in North London.