Book Review: "Waiting on a Friend" by Natalie Adler

It’s 1984 in New York City’s East Village. AIDS has started ravaging communities all over the country, but NYC has been hit particularly hard. Renata has been seeing ghosts of people who have died, some she was friends or acquaintances with, some she never knew. She isn’t quite sure how to help them, but for the most part, they don’t cause trouble.

When Mark, Renata’s best friend and roommate, dies from complications of the disease, she is devastated. She wasn’t at the hospital when he died, which was how she imagined it would be. So she’s eagerly awaiting Mark’s ghost to visit her. But for some reason, he’s not showing up.

“I thought about the ghosts I had known. Were any of them suffering? How would I know? Who can really tell what goes on in someone else’s life, or death? Some of them remained, outwardly, at least, concerned with the petty issues of their lives, and others were above everything, as if they had one foot in our world and another in a place we couldn’t imagine.”

As Renata mourns Mark and takes tentative steps toward a relationship with a nurse she met, Claude, she tries to move on. But at the same time, a company has popped up in the city promising to rid people’s apartments of ghosts or other disturbances. Renata is convinced this shady company is not doing the good deeds it purports to do, and it’s up to her and her friends to try and uncover their true motives.

“How was I supposed to mourn anyone—Mark, François, my mother, whoever was next—when it would take the rest of my life to accept that they were gone when they should have been here still? How do I mourn someone when I can’t get over that one fact, that they were supposed to be alive but they were not and there were people responsible for that?”

This is another terrific 2026 debut. It definitely packs an emotional punch, and some scenes remind me of the movie Longtime Companion, which I love. How much would we love a glimpse of loved ones we’ve lost, just one more time?