Love Stories for Ghosts

Alex Latimer was short-listed for the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and his Love Stories for Ghosts is a pleasurably weird and wonderful collection that will live in the reader’s memory long after the last page has been read. These stories feature characters enacting lonesome and tender scenes of unrequited love, or being set adrift by loss on inner voyages at an early age. However, even though death is never far away, there is usually a redemptive arc, and the connections between the living and the dead seem naturally imbued with a lightness that isn’t always present in stories with a fantasy element. Latimer’s ghosts find love in the afterlife as a bad smell, as an awaiting greeter in a sparse heaven that consists of a house with a garden and a pool, and as a couple who want to escape death and find an eternity together on the moon. Original, melancholy and occasionally sweet, these stories tackle the big questions: where do souls go? Who do you become when you die? What is heaven like? Does reincarnation exist? Can you communicate with ghosts? Responses to all these difficult-to-answer queries find purchase in Latimer’s capable storytelling.