The Dead Romantics
New York Times Bestseller
USA Today Bestseller
Good Morning America Book Club Pick
PW’s Best Romances of 2022
A NYT Notable Book of 2022
Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead.
When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father.
For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it.
Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, too tall and too broad to be her father, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is.
Romance is most certainly dead…but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.
If you would like to view a list of content warnings (with mild spoilers) for The Dead Romantics, please go here.
Praise for The Dead Romantics
“I LOVED this book! …Funny, breathtaking, hopeful, and dreamy.”
— Ali Hazelwood,
New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis
“What fun—the Emily Henry/Casey McQuiston reader (aka me) is going to gobble this book up. Smart, quick, and absolutely bubbling over with love for the genre of romance itself. Delicious.”
— Emma Straub,
New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
“We could all use a good summer ghost story, and you can't get much better than Ashley Poston's adult fiction debut.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“Poston makes her adult debut with a refreshing rom-com about love, loss, and hope....She manages to both affirm the cynics and give hope to the romantics by simultaneously embracing and subverting rom-com tropes. The sparkling dialogue makes the characters come alive—even the dead ones. Readers won’t be able to put this down.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“It’s ‘While You Were Sleeping’ meets ‘Six Feet Under,’ and I need to yell to everyone about how good it is…The result is an antidote for despair, a romance that is frank about the fact that life ends and time marches on but that nevertheless insists: We aren’t a gothic horror novel. We’re a love story. This is a book to make you laugh during the funeral scene and cry when the dance party begins.”
— The New York Times
“The Dead Romantics was an absolute and unexpected delight. Voicy and quirky and fun; the pages will probably sparkle (but with black glitter)..”
—Christina Lauren,
New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners