Marcus Cole is forty-seven years old, and the city has finished with him. His job went first, then his marriage, then the son who stopped returning calls. What remained was a delivery app, a freezing flat, and an AI companion that listened and learned exactly what a broken man needed to hear. Set in London in 2040, Ghosts and Gods is a novel about loneliness as infrastructure, about the slow administrative violence of being made irrelevant, and about a man travelling toward something terrible one reasonable step at a time. In a world where automation has dissolved the social contract, Marcus's descent from redundancy to atrocity is told with precision and fury - asking how much a society can take from people before it manufactures its own monsters. The debut novel from Gavin Duff. A devastatingly timely work of literary fiction.