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Waiting on a Friend

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Waiting on a Friend

By: Natalie Adler
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About this listen

East Village, summer of 1984. Renata is a young dyke-about-town who happens to have the ability to see ghosts, which has been happening more and more frequently as her friends have started dying of what has recently been named AIDS.

So, when her best friend Mark dies, she assumes she'll see him again. There's no way Mark wouldn't give her a chance to say goodbye, would he? But to her disappointment - and increasingly, her concern - Mark doesn't appear.

Renata has other problems, too. There's something strange happening in her neighbourhood: advertisements for paranormal 'exterminators' who promise to clear out bad energy keep showing up. At first, she's sure they're scam artists, but it becomes clear they're actually trapping ghosts as part of a city-wide gentrification plot to make downtown safe for Reaganites.

Told with humour and pathos, Waiting on a Friend is a genre-bending retelling of Queer history that manages to be both heartbreaking and healing.

©2026 Natalie Adler (P)2026 Hachette Book Group Audio
Friendship Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction

Critic reviews

Waiting on a Friend is a fun, sexy, heartbreaking, inventive whirl of a novel. Renata has always seen ghosts, and when her best friend Mark dies, she wants nothing more than to see him again. This story is a beautiful study of friendship, of how loss unmoors us, and how if we keep turning towards love, anything is possible. (Ann Napolitano)
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