Book Review: ‘Ghost Month’ by Simon Wroe

The second I saw the title of this book I was intrigued and once I had read the summary I knew I had to read it.

Full of wit, heart and charm, Ghost Month asks a timeless question: do we only value life when we are reminded that it will end?

Perhaps you've already noticed little things, strange details. A shadow not attached to anything. A face in a window which might be a trick of the light. They come at dusk. Today.

Every September, the spirits of the dead return before vanishing four weeks later in a puff of green ash.

The haunting has become a holiday - part Christmas, part Halloween, full of annual reckonings with the past. The ghosts aren't real in any way that can hurt you, so it's hard to tell the silent spectres from ashen commuters: they linger on train platforms, they crowd buses, they take up space on your sofa. The proper term these days is 'people without pulses'.

This year, four strangers prepare for a visit from their dearly departed. The season forces them to confront all the things that haunt them, not just their dead. As suppressed truths emerge from the shadows, each of them will end Ghost Month changed in ways they never imagined.

Happy Haunting.

Seeing Ghost Month from the perspective of four different people who are grieving in different ways, who lost and are losing differently, and dealing with the reappearance of their loved ones in their own way was the highlight of this book for me, especially when they started to meld and intersect.

All of this set against the backdrop of a London September as the last sparks of summer flicker out and Autumn brings in crunchy leaves and scarves was so atmospheric. There’s something so alive about London which so perfectly contrasts the way that the appearance of the ghosts brings back death and suspends the lives of the grieving.

It feels strange to say that it was easy to read considering the pain, hurt, trauma and grief in the pages of this book, but it was. The POVs flowed into each other effortlessly, even more so as they started to cross over each other, and I was fully invested in each of them, even though I still felt like I was kept at a distance.

I really enjoyed ‘Ghost Month’ and the way that it explored, loss, grief and what it really means to live.