A few years ago, probably decades in the land of celebrities but a heartbeat ago to the rest of us, Charlize Theron dated Sean Penn.  You probably don’t really care, after all, what are the lives of celebrities to us mere mortals, but for a brief period of time they were an intriguing ‘it couple’, covered by magazines the world over.  That is, until they weren’t. The story went that Theron had ‘ghosted’ Penn, leaving many of us reaching for the internet, not out of curiosity about their love lives, but rather to discover what the hell it meant to be ghosted?

Retrospectively speaking I was once ghosted.  I was dating a pseudo Sicilian, a sort of younger version of Andy Garcia.  Things were moving apace until one day he stopped calling. This was long before the days of text messaging and after a couple of attempts to reach him and a week of solid moping, I too called it a day on our three month fling.  Nowadays things would not be so simple. In this age of social media so much of our life is out there for discovery that being ghosted must be awful. An endless odyssey of online profile building and stalking. 

In Walsh’s novel, Ghosted, Sarah falls in love with Eddie. They meet seemingly by chance and spend a perfect week together wrapped up in what feels like love.  Why then, upon his return from holiday, does Eddie not contact her? If it’s love, why would he not show up when he said he would? Why would he appear to be online, but not respond to any of her messages?  Walsh’s tale makes you endlessly wonder what you would do, if you had met the one and then lost him, how far would you go to find him, after even a short period of time?

This story certainly isn’t a heavy read, but it is a good one and to me the idea felt obvious and yet new.  I wanted to root for Sarah, but found myself wondering how questionable it was to keep going when all the signs suggested that he just wasn’t into her.  The twists and turn were fun too, leading you down paths that you hadn’t really considered. All in all, if you fancy a novel that will let you while away a weekend or several cold winter nights, then this is for you.