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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher, author Tom Perrotta is returning to the City Opera House stage to talk about Ghost Town, a gripping story about a tumultuous summer in 1970s suburban New Jersey, reminiscent of Perrotta’s own hometown. This nostalgic story is told from the perspective of a middle-aged writer looking back on a series of events that changed his life—and the story he finally has the courage to tell.
Jimmy Perrini lives just a few miles from Manhattan, but a world apart. At the end of eighth grade, tragedy strikes and Jimmy finds himself lost in a fog of grief that alienates him from friends and family, drifting instead into troubling friendships with two older teenagers: one a notorious local burnout with a fast car and a shaky grasp of reality; the other a smart, eccentric girl, whom Jimmy finds himself drawn to as they become entranced by her Ouija board, which may just offer the only salve to their grief.
As a fateful public drama unfolds, Jimmy is torn between the occult beyond and the cold realities of the place he has called home. Narrated by a much older Jimmy, a literary-turned-commercial novelist, Ghost Town reveals how the past haunts the present—the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we’ve left them behind.