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Verdict: A tender, funny and genuinely devastating AIDS-era grief novel with a ghost-seeing lesbian narrator, undercut by a ghost-trapping caper subplot that readers and critics alike say never quite belongs to the same book.
Best for: Readers who want queer history told from inside a friendship rather than from a hospital ward, and who can forgive a plot that wobbles for the sake of a voice, a neighbourhood and a final page that lands.
Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — frank about sex, not built around it; romance.io does not index it)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.73 Goodreads average across 1,155 ratings, with the critics warmer than the readers)
Tropes: Grief and haunting, found family, best friends, ghost-seeing narrator, magical realism, 1980s East Village, AIDS crisis, gentrification, queer community resistance, debut novel.
Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler is a standalone debut from Hogarth, a work of literary fiction with a supernatural spine set in the East Village in the summer of 1984, where Renata, a young dyke who has always been able to see the dead, waits for the ghost of her best friend Mark to come home — and discovers that a company called Manhattan Remediation is quietly clearing ghosts, and the people who mourn them, out of the neighbourhood.
It has a 3.73 average across 1,155 Goodreads ratings, starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, and a Book Marks tally of eight critic reviews that comes out as a rave. The reader reviews are cooler and more specific than the press, and they keep circling the same structural problem. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.
What Is Waiting on a Friend About?
Waiting on a Friend is queer historical fiction first and a ghost story second, and it is not a romance. Its setting is a specific place at a specific moment: the Lower East Side in 1984, when AIDS had only just been named, nobody was sure how it spread, and the rent-controlled tenements that sheltered a queer, broke, artistic community were starting to look like real estate.
Renata Bronstein is 29, works at a secondhand shop, and lives in the apartment she shared with Mark. What she lacks is not courage or wit — she has plenty of both — but any way to finish grieving, because every other friend she has lost has lingered and Mark has not. What Manhattan Remediation assumes is that ghosts are a nuisance to be removed for a fee. Renata narrates alone, in a confessional first person that moves between the present and remembered years — the book’s greatest asset and, for some readers, its limit.
What Makes This Queer Historical Ghost Novel Work
- The sense of place: The 1984 East Village is the most consistently praised element across readers and critics alike — the thrift shops, clubs and tenement apartments that Kirkus singles out, and a neighbourhood readers describe as vivid and authentic.
- Grief as the engine: A ghost-seer whose dead friend refuses to appear is a genuinely original way into AIDS-era loss. StoryGraph readers tag it emotional (85%) and sad (70%) above anything else.
- Humour in the dark: Reviewers repeatedly say the book is funny, which is what stops 288 pages of mourning from becoming unbearable. The Star Tribune compared Adler to Ann Patchett for exactly that balance.
- Renata herself: 81% of StoryGraph readers call the characters loveable, and the narrator’s sass-with-vulnerability voice carries the book even for readers who have reservations about its plot.
- The final page: Several readers single out the last line specifically. The paranormal device earns its place in the ending even where it strains in the middle.
Book Synopsis
Renata has seen ghosts for as long as she can remember, and in the East Village of 1984 there is no shortage of them. The young men she dances and argues with are dying one after another of a disease with no treatment and barely a name, and most of them do not leave entirely. They drift back into kitchens and stairwells, confused or furious or still in pain, and Renata, who can see them, keeps them company.
So when Mark dies — her best friend, her roommate, the person she has built her whole downtown life around — she does the one thing she knows how to do. She waits. She listens for him in the apartment they shared and tells herself that he is simply taking longer than the others. He does not come. And the longer the silence stretches, the more it begins to feel like a verdict on the friendship itself: that he left without saying goodbye, or that he did not want to be found.
Meanwhile, flyers are appearing around the neighbourhood. A company called Manhattan Remediation offers to rid apartments of unwanted presences, and the ghosts Renata knows are starting to disappear. So are some of her living neighbours, pushed out of rent-controlled buildings that suddenly have eager new buyers. Renata begins to suspect that whatever is happening to the dead of her neighbourhood is connected to what is happening to its living — and that if Mark has not come back, someone may have made sure he could not.
My Review
The premise is the best thing here, and I want to say that plainly because most of what follows qualifies it. A narrator who can see the dead, living through a plague that is killing her friends, waiting for the one ghost who will not come — that is a genuinely new angle on a subject that has been written about with great seriousness for forty years, and Adler uses it to say something true about grief: that the absence of the person you most want back can feel like a judgment.
The second real strength is Renata’s voice. She is caustic, self-mocking, loyal to the point of foolishness and very funny, and the humour is doing structural work — it is what lets the book stay in a room full of dying people without turning into a lament. Readers who loved it keep reaching for words like “authentic” and “heartfelt,” and the found-family texture of her circle, all thrift shops and dance floors, is where the book comes most alive.
Where it struggles is structure, and this is not my personal gripe — it is the single most repeated criticism in the reader reviews, and Kirkus says the same thing. The Manhattan Remediation plot, the ghost-trapping company fronting a gentrification scheme, sits awkwardly on top of the grief novel. At least five independent Goodreads reviewers say it either needed far more room or should have been cut, and several say the book loses momentum once the investigation takes over. Around that sit the secondary complaints: a fractured, back-and-forth timeline that some readers found distancing, tonal lurches between caper and elegy, and a confessional style that one DNF reader felt told rather than showed. The Boston Globe, otherwise a rave, also caught two period slips, including references to AIDS testing that arrive too early for 1984.
One expectation to reset, particularly for readers of this site: this is not a lesbian romance. Renata has a love life, but the central bond is her platonic devotion to Mark, and the romance is background texture. The marketing also leans on the Ghostbusters-flavoured hook, while readers overwhelmingly experience it as a grief novel. If the ghosts are what drew you, calibrate; if a sad book about AIDS is what worried you, know that it is also warm and frequently funny.
My honest note: A four-star heart inside a three-star plot, carried by voice and place. If you need a novel’s threads to tie together, the caper will frustrate you. If you read for a narrator and a neighbourhood, this one is worth the heartbreak.
| Element | In Waiting on a Friend |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Renata & Mark — lesbian narrator and her gay best friend, a platonic bond tested by his death and silence |
| Core tropes | Grief and haunting, found family, ghost-seeing narrator, magical realism, gentrification, queer community resistance |
| Setting | East Village, New York City, summer 1984, with memories reaching back through the late 1970s |
| Heat level | 2/5 — frank sexual references, not a focus; not indexed by romance.io |
| Series | Standalone debut novel |
| Content notes | Terminal illness, death and grief (graphic), death of a parent, domestic abuse, homophobia, child abuse, drug use, blood |
How Spicy Is Waiting on a Friend?
A 2/5, and that number is descriptive rather than a criticism. romance.io does not index Waiting on a Friend at all — which tells you it is not being catalogued as romance by the people who track heat. The rating here comes from reader reports instead: the book is frank about sex and about the club and party culture of the period, one DNF reviewer found the explicit language performative, and a couple of readers mention intimate moments between Renata and Mark. Nobody reads it for heat, and nobody describes extended on-page scenes.
The element worth flagging in advance is that intimacy between Renata and Mark: at least one reader found it uncomfortable given how the friendship is framed, though it is a single voice rather than a theme. If you want literary sapphic fiction at a similar temperature, The Night Watch and Our Wives Under the Sea sit in the same 2/5 band.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want queer history told through friendship and community, you like a narrator with bite and a sense of humour, you enjoy magical realism used as metaphor rather than as a system, and you are happy to be moved to tears by a debut.
You may want to skip it if: you need a tightly plotted novel whose subplots pay off, you are looking for a lesbian romance at the centre, you find back-and-forth timelines distancing, or grief and terminal illness are too close to home right now.
In short: an original and heartfelt grief novel whose ghost-trapping plot is the price of admission.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
This is a traditionally published literary debut, and its discovery channel is the one that implies: the trade press, not BookTok. Oprah Daily named it its number one pick for summer reading, Amazon’s editors put it on their best-books-of-the-year-so-far list, Library Journal made it its Fiction Debut of the Month for March 2026 with a starred review, and Publishers Weekly starred it too. Book Marks aggregates eight critic reviews, from the Boston Globe to The Times, and scores the book a rave overall; only Kirkus is mixed. I found no sign of organic BookTok traction in searches, and Reddit could not be checked from here, so I cannot say whether there is a Reddit footprint. What there is instead is a steady build to 1,155 Goodreads ratings and 476 StoryGraph ratings in four months.
The audiobook arrived the same day as the hardcover, 26 May 2026, from Random House Audio, narrated by Dani Martineck and running 8 hours and 17 minutes. I found little listener commentary on the narration itself, positive or negative.
Prefer audio? Listen to Waiting on a Friend on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The grief, first and most consistently — “one of the best written takes on grief” is the kind of line that recurs, and readers describe it as cathartic. Then the place: the 1984 East Village reads as lived-in rather than researched, and readers who lived through the period say it rang true. Renata’s voice gets named constantly, usually with the word “funny” nearby, and the humour is repeatedly credited with keeping the book from being crushing. The final page draws specific praise from multiple reviewers. Comparisons land on The Great Believers and It’s a Sin.
What readers argue about and complain about: The Manhattan Remediation subplot, above everything. At least five Goodreads reviewers say the ghost-trapping plot is underdeveloped or misplaced, one calls the pairing of Ghostbusters premise and grief story awkward, and Kirkus reaches the same verdict, calling the book “original, albeit uneven.” That agreement between readers and a trade reviewer is a stronger signal than either alone. Second: momentum. Several readers say the second half loses energy, and one three-star reviewer describes the ending stretch as a chore. Third: structure and tone — a fractured timeline that some found distancing, and shifts between caper and elegy that did not sit comfortably. A smaller group wanted Renata’s friendships dramatised rather than asserted. Amazon’s distribution is notable, too: 13% two-star reviews among 84, unusual on a platform that normally shows almost none. StoryGraph’s 6% did-not-finish rate is modest — lower than the 9% I reported for Her Spell That Binds Me — and the one DNF note I read cited heaviness rather than quality.
The standalone question worth asking first: this is a complete, standalone debut and requires nothing else. There is no earlier Adler novel to go back to and no sequel announced, so the next step is sideways into the same subject rather than further into the author’s catalogue.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Waiting on a Friend a lesbian romance?
No. It is literary historical fiction with a lesbian narrator and a supernatural thread. Renata has a love life, but the heart of the book is her friendship with Mark and her grief after his death.
How spicy is Waiting on a Friend?
A 2/5. romance.io does not index the book, and readers describe it as frank about sex rather than built around it. There are no extended explicit scenes that reviewers flag.
Is Waiting on a Friend part of a series?
No. It is a standalone debut novel from Hogarth, published on 26 May 2026, and it resolves on its own.
Is there an audiobook of Waiting on a Friend?
Yes. Random House Audio released it on 26 May 2026, narrated by Dani Martineck and running 8 hours and 17 minutes.
Is Waiting on a Friend very sad?
Yes, but not only sad. StoryGraph readers tag it emotional and sad above everything else, but the humour in Renata’s voice is repeatedly credited with keeping it bearable.
If You Loved Waiting on a Friend, Read These Next
For queer history told from inside a community under pressure, Stone Butch Blues is the essential companion — rawer, angrier and set just before Renata’s world. If it was the grief and the uncanny that held you, Our Wives Under the Sea does the same thing with far less plot and far more dread. And if the shuffled timeline interested you more than it frustrated you, The Night Watch runs its queer London story backwards on purpose.
For more in this register, browse our literary and character-driven fiction reviews or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Waiting on a Friend is a debut with a big, original idea about grief and a lot of heart. The ghost-seeing premise is genuinely new, the 1984 East Village is vivid and lived-in, and Renata’s voice is funny enough to carry you through a book about a plague. It is also uneven: the ghost-trapping caper never settles into the same novel as the mourning, the timeline scatters, and the second half loses pace. Whether that trade is worth it depends on whether you read for plot or for voice — but the reader who comes for Renata and her neighbourhood gets a moving book with a final page people remember. Check Waiting on a Friend on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Waiting on a Friend ranks as an ambitious queer historical ghost novel — tender, funny and deeply felt, held back by a subplot it never integrates, and best approached for the grief and the East Village rather than the caper.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ 3.73 average across 1,155 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ PW and Library Journal starred reviews
- ✓ Book Marks scores eight critics a rave
- ✓ Readers and Kirkus fault the subplot
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Renata and Mark’s bond is the core
- ✓ Friendship written with real devotion
- ✓ A new relationship develops alongside grief
- ✓ Not a romance, and romance is background
Characters ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ 81% of StoryGraph readers call them loveable
- ✓ Renata’s voice named in review after review
- ✓ 68% report strong character development
- ✓ Some wanted the friendships dramatised more
Writing ★★★★☆ 3.8/5
- ✓ Lyrical grief writing widely praised
- ✓ Humour lands for most readers
- ✓ Trade press near-unanimously admiring
- ✓ Fractured timeline and tonal lurches
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.2/5
- ✓ Tagged emotional by 85% on StoryGraph
- ✓ Readers call it healing and cathartic
- ✓ Mark’s absence is a genuine wound
- ✓ Caper subplot dilutes the grief
Heat Level ★★☆☆☆ 2/5
- ✓ Not indexed by romance.io
- ✓ Frank about sex and club culture
- ✓ No extended explicit scenes flagged
- ✓ One reader uneasy about Renata and Mark
Ending ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ Final line praised by several readers
- ✓ Standalone with nothing left hanging
- ✓ “Sad and weird and beautiful,” says one
- ✓ Second half loses momentum getting there
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ Voice and setting reward a return
- ✓ 8-hour audiobook makes an easy second pass
- ✓ Short at 288 pages
- ✓ Heavy subject discourages a quick reread
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