Ghosts of New York

by Jim Lewis

Literary Fiction

Speculative

Experimental

306 Pages

"Hypnotic and strange—Lewis creates a New York that feels both intimately familiar and dreamlike."

Synopsis

Ghosts of New York is a novel where the laws of time and space have been subtly suspended, creating a New York City that feels both recognizable and uncanny. Jim Lewis interweaves four narrative strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up after years living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student entangled with his romantic partner and best friend in relationships with far-reaching personal and political repercussions; and a shopkeeper experiencing first love late in life. These stories are bound together even as they propel each other into stranger territory, their connections emerging through echoes, repetitions, and mysterious convergences. Undergirding it all is a song that appears, disappears, and resurfaces across time and space. Mixing prophecy, history, and speculative fiction, the novel explores complex lives through indelible renderings of settings—bars, night markets, recording studios—that alternate between the familiar and the unsettling. The work of a celebrated novelist and veteran of New York and Austin's art, film, and music scenes, Ghosts of New York will immediately absorb readers intrigued by creative people and the places that simultaneously sustain and challenge them. This is a novel about how cities haunt us and how we haunt them in return.

Our Take

Ghosts of New York is an ambitious, formally adventurous novel that demands patience and rewards close attention. Jim Lewis, whose work the New York Times called "a rare talent," creates a New York where time folds in on itself and characters' lives intersect in ways that feel both inevitable and mysterious. This isn't a straightforward narrative—it's a mosaic that requires readers to trust the connections will emerge. What makes the novel exceptional is Lewis's ability to render specific New York spaces with such sensory precision that they become characters themselves. The bars, studios, and street corners feel alive with history and possibility. The speculative elements are subtle rather than flashy—time doesn't so much break as bend, allowing past and present to coexist. The prose is lyrical without being precious, grounded in the physical reality of the city even as it gestures toward something more ethereal. The recurring song serves as a kind of musical through-line, connecting disparate moments and people across decades. This is a novel for readers who appreciate formally innovative fiction and aren't looking for conventional plot resolution. Fans of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders will recognize similar ambitions here. Ghosts of New York is a love letter to the city and to the way art, music, and place shape the people who move through them—essential reading for anyone interested in experimental urban fiction.