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New York City, East Village, 1984. A young woman with the power to see the ghosts of her friends is haunted by the one who refuses to return—a dazzling, big-hearted debut of friendship and community during a time of devastation and defiance.
Renata is a young dyke-about-town who can see ghosts, something she's doing more and more of lately as too many of her friends are dying of a new, terrifying disease. When Renata's best friend Mark dies of complications from AIDS, Renata is devastated by the loss of the person she loved most in the world. And to her disappointment and increasing despair, Mark seems unwilling or unable to return for the proper goodbye they both were denied.
While Renata waits anxiously for Mark, she must stay vigilant: a mysterious, police-like force has begun ridding their East Village neighborhood of anything abnormal or inexplicable. What first seems like a scam reveals itself to be far more sinister, targeting the soul of Renata's community. With her band of lovably eccentric pals and lovers, Renata is determined to fight back against the erasure of her friends' memories and the sanitizing of her beloved New York. But haunting her every step is Mark, the one ghost who stubbornly refuses to reappear.
Both heartbreaking and healing, tragic and triumphant, Waiting on a Friend is a magical retelling of queer history and a celebration of youth and camaraderie. With pathos and humor, empathy and an edge, Natalie Adler freshly reimagines the past for a new generation, reclaiming the spirit of resistance and determination that would become one of the era's defining legacies.
"Adler's intimate portrayal of the period is richly detailed, both in the grim atmosphere and the city's life-affirming downtown arts community. This dazzles like a mirror ball." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Spellbinding ... Adler's debut is highly recommended for readers who enjoy vividly drawn literary fiction about the past." —Library Journal (starred review)
"An AIDS novel with an original, albeit uneven, approach to the subject of loss." —Kirkus Reviews
"Waiting on a Friend is a fun, sexy, heartbreaking, inventive whirl of a novel. Renata has always seen ghosts, and when her best friend Mark dies, she wants nothing more than to see him again. This story is a beautiful study of friendship, of how loss unmoors us, and how if we keep turning towards love, anything is possible." —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful
"Waiting on a Friend is a breathtaking novel: candid, wickedly funny, deeply generous, and kind. Above all else it is a kind book. The plotting is intricate. The characters, moving and well-drawn. I absolutely loved it and could not stop reading." —Jiaming Tang, author of Cinema Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award
This information about Waiting on a Friend was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Natalie Adler has an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She was a Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction and is an editor at Lux magazine. She is from New Jersey and lives in New York City.
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