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Crammed with unlikely occurrences, asinine dialogue and excessive meandering, Dolly Alderton's "Ghosts" quickly descends from a reasonably promising piece of fiction into a tiring farce.

The story is narrated from the perspective of its main character, Nina George Dean, a single, thirty-two-year-old food writer, whose middle name was given to her in honour of George Michael (an uninteresting fact that is mentioned a needless amount times throughout the book). The novel follows Nina as she pairs up with her last single friend to embark on a quest of finding romance through dating apps. While this appears to be the story's premise, only a fraction of the book's writing is dedicated to Nina's brief relationship with a man she meets on a dating app. Instead of the novel having a plot, it has several subplots running together that bear little significance to one another. Each of these subplots lack development and they mostly just labour the point of how people or things in Nina's life have changed since she was younger.

Weak characterization and nonsensical dynamics between characters are another flaw of this novel. Some of the absurd connections between characters range from the mild-mannered Nina being best friends with her ex-boyfriend and his fiancé, to Nina having sex with her unrealistically belligerent neighbour on her kitchen floor during a confrontation that nearly escalates into a brawl. The characters themselves really lack depth and individuality, and are mostly just clichés of thirty-something-year-olds who are torn between wanting to settle down and wanting to maintain their youth.

The only parts of "Ghosts" that are any bit perceptive or that pique the reader's interest, are the sections that critique the trivialities of modern lifestyle and dating. So much so, it's almost as if Dolly Alderton stitched a dozen of her weekly Sunday Times columns together, forced a limp narrative around them, and then called it a novel.