Where to start with this? If you’re in the market for a first person narration set during the AIDS crisis in New York, exploring grief, community and friendship but with a sprinkling of Ghostbusters, then you’re in luck. And even if you don’t think you’re in the market for this, I recommend it anyway.
Waiting on a Friend is about Renata, a woman living and working in New York in the early 80s. She has a wide circle of friends but lived with Mark, a gay man and her best friend, who she occasionally slept with. But Mark has died and Renata wasn’t there at the time.
The bulk of the book is about her grief, about missing him and about how she tries to go on with her life, for a while wallowing and pushing people away but it becomes apparent that she can’t do that forever.
Because Renata can see ghosts. It’s a skill inherited from her mother, who was alcoholic, and who made Renata’s childhood difficult to manage. And so while she mourns, she is also waiting on Mark, to be able to see him again. And he doesn’t show up. Instead Renata is visited by the ghosts of other friends who have died, including several who are in pain of some kind. Unable to bear their pain as well as her own, she turns to a company that deals in removing and containing the ghosts, run by a man who Renata knows, a man whose girlfriend jumped from the top of the library at college and both he and Renata then saw her ghost. Of course, she immediately regrets having the ghost taken away and has to stage a rescue with her friends.
If this all sounds silly, it’s not. It reads really well and makes absolute sense. Of course ghosts are real. Of course you can suck them up and keep them in a warehouse in Brooklyn instead of helping them. Of course this is all displacement for guilt and shame and utter desolation at someone’s passing.
The story is told in first person by Renata and deals with flashbacks to her time with Mark as well a few scenes with her mother. I thought it was really expertly managed and would LOVE to see the TV adaptation. Sounds right up Channel 4’s street.
Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler is published on 26 May 2026 by Quercus
Susan E Barsby 