The Dead Romantics
Florence Day is a New York ghostwriter for a bestselling romance novelist, secretly cynical about love and quietly behind on her book, when two things happen at once: her hot new editor Ben Andor tells her the manuscript is unacceptable, and her father, who ran the family's small-town funeral home in South Carolina, dies. Back in Mairmont to help bury him, Florence finds Ben waiting on her porch as a ghost, with no memory of how he got there and no way to leave. As the two of them try to untangle why he is haunting her, Florence confronts the grief she has been running from and the strange, stubborn possibility that she might still believe in a happy ending. Ashley Poston's novel pairs genre romance warmth with a tender, funny story about family, home, and the uses of fiction.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Dead Romantics
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Ghostwriter Florence Day is on deadline for a romance she no longer believes in when her father dies and she has to fly home to her family's South Carolina funeral home. Her stern new editor's actual ghost is waiting on the porch.
Yes. The Dead Romantics is a contemporary romance with a paranormal twist: a ghostwriter for a romance author falls for a ghost who has just died. It has more on-page emotion than steam.
The Dead Romantics is a standalone, but Ashley Poston has written additional books in similar romcom-with-paranormal territory, including The Seven Year Slip and A Novel Love Story.
The Dead Romantics was written by Ashley Poston, published in 2022 by HarperCollins Publishers Limited.
The Dead Romantics is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Dead Romantics takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Dead Romantics is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.