To celebrate the release of Max Lury’s novel, No Ghosts, we are delighted to host him in conversation with Ian Maleney. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives, and marks the arrival of a major new literary novelist.
All are welcome to attend. Attendance is free but booking is essential.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
MAX LURY is a British writer based in London. He received the 2022 Curtis Brown Prize whilst studying creative writing at UEA, and is the winner of the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize 2024. No Ghosts is his debut novel.
IAN MALENEY is a writer and editor living in Dublin. His first book, Minor Monuments, was published by Tramp Press in 2019. He has written for The Observer, The New Statesman, Esquire, and the Irish Times, amongst others. He is the co-editor of fallow, a bi-annual literary magazine, and the producer of several award-winning documentary podcast series, including The Witness: In His Own Words (2021) and The Gambler (2024).
PRAISE FOR ‘NO GHOSTS’
‘In Max Lury’s No Ghosts, astringent comic realism is twinned with an eerie plot about Big Tech’s power to reframe death.’
Anthony Cummins, New Statesman, ‘The best fiction to read this year’
“It’s rare to encounter a novel as wholly original and moving as No Ghosts, an uncanny venture into a world slightly tilted – a world where darkness is never far out of the frame, but where hope and love, too, underpin everything. Lury’s writing is vivid and fresh, and by the end I was holding my breath, totally enraptured by the journey the novel had taken me on.”
Sophie Mackintosh
“[A] superb debut novel. It trembles with dread and wit and longing and feeling. It’s vivid and startling, and its characters live and breathe and suffer right off the page. There’s undercurrents of Delillo and Richard Powers there, and also Mike McCormack, but for the 21st century’s emergent technologies and existential crises rather than the 20th’s. It feels to me like a keen and powerful exploration of what it is like to exist alongside AI and big tech, in the 21st century’s new and increasingly alien reality. At the same time it feels like a hauntological ode to friendship, to the objects and hyperobjects of our world, to memory and the thrill of being. It’s utterly compelling.”
Danny Denton