Poor Ghost!

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What to expect

'Gabriel Flynn's work, rich with insight and wit, makes the world newly vivid'
Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

'A clear-eyed, deadpan-funny novel about the present'
Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

'Place, belonging, failure, ambition: this beguilingly readable novel has interesting, fresh things to say on them all'
Wendy Erskine, author of The Benefactors

'A moving meditation on inheritance and home'
Esquire

'A brilliantly simple idea . . . compellingly complicated characters'
Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork

When Luca drops out of his prestigious PhD programme and moves back home to Manchester, he thinks he'll take some time to consider his life choices: the failed love affair that ended in a disastrous holiday and embarrassing exit, the pursuit of an academic life that gave him nothing but a strong sense of failure.

In need of money, and still convinced the literary life might be for him, Luca takes on a job as a ghost writer: Andy, who has progressive MS, wants Luca to write his life story. Luca's own father had MS and eventually took his own life - making the assignment a full immersion in the dark parts of his childhood Luca has never really dealt with. Luca has his own ideas about what Andy's book should be like - but he'll have to learn how to curb his dreaming, if he ever wants to get paid.

While his love of literature and intellectual ambition might have got him so far away from his childhood in Manchester, Luca is grappling with what it means to try to go home again - how far where you're from shapes you, and how difficult your parent's past is to shake off.

'Laconic and darkly poignant, Poor Ghost! tackles class, grief and narrative perplexity with distinctive dry wit'
Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells

Critics Review

Poor Ghost! is a compulsive, razor-sharp and deeply tender novel about dislocation, belonging and authenticity; the past beating away beneath it all the while.
Lara Williams, author of Supper Club
Gabriel Flynn's work, rich with insight and wit, makes the world newly vivid. I'm always interested to read what he writes.
Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
Sharp and coolly beautiful . . . The morph back and forth between tenderness and horror, between love-as-duty and love-as-cannibalism put me in a vivid, immersive vertigo
Tim MacGabhann, author of Call Him Mine
In this story of two strangers struggling to tell one another the stories of their respective lives, Gabriel Flynn creates a kind of laboratory for examining miscommunication. At the heart of his novel there is a brilliantly simple idea and there are compellingly complicated characters. What results is a microscopic, forensic examination of the knottiness and involution of human relationships
Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork
Poor Ghost! is a darkly funny and deeply intelligent novel about literature, class, and how to tell a good story. With echoes of Ben Lerner, Flynn skillfully explores a young man's struggle to make sense of both his family's legacy and his Manchester hometown. Beautifully wise, sad, and witty
Julianne Pachico, author of Jungle House
Poor Ghost! is unostentatiously beautiful and plainly brilliant. Flynn's vivid characters come alive off the page in this propulsive, deeply enjoyable, perfectly unsettling story of motive and motivation, desire and ambition. Intimate, clever, unforgettable.
Elvia Wilk , author of Oval
Laconic and darkly poignant, Poor Ghost tackles class, grief and narrative perplexity with distinctive dry wit
Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells
Place, belonging, failure, ambition: this beguilingly readable novel has interesting, fresh things to say on them all. The complex business of the stories people tell is explored by Gabriel Flynn in compelling, unexpected ways
Wendy Erskine, author of The Benefactors
Reinforced by stinging deployment of similes and metaphors, Poor Ghost! is a solid exploration of trauma, class and people's sense of place - wherever that may be.
New Statesman
Poor Ghost! presents three episodes from his life, sewn together with such skill that the seams are barely visible . . . Flynn proves himself an adept psychologist and a powerful descriptive writer. The rain, pigeons and addicts of the north of England are evoked as clearly as the libraries, bars and parks of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's a simple story - a sensitive, bookish man suffers grief in childhood, tries to salve the pain with intense love, fails, works off his own grief by obsessing over someone else's, fails again and must come to terms with the original wound - but Flynn does a lot with it. Poor Ghost! is a moving book which will stay with me.
Literary Review
A moving meditation on inheritance and home, and the difficulties that come along with both of those things
Esquire
At the heart of it all is the pain of losing a parent, a pain compounded by the resemblances to this pain that are found wherever Luca looks. Readers who admire the portraits of difficult parents in the fiction of Gwendoline Riley will find comparable satisfactions (and pathos) in the portrayal of Luca's father . . . This is a novel with a genuine social world. Many of the secondary characters in the book are well drawn, the sympathetic but no-nonsense friend Tom, especially. The dynamic between Tom and Luca is genuinely affecting and one of the better depictions of 'male friendship' in recent fiction . . . we can admire Flynn's dedication to keeping his novel honest
Review 31
I think Gabriel Flynn writes beautiful sentences, and his novel Poor Ghost! - a moving portrait told with intimacy and poise - is composed of a plenitude of such sentences
Adrian Duncan, author of A Sabbatical in Leipzig
An expansive portrait of a city in decline, a gripping character study, and a sneakily profound account of a doomed freelance business venture, Poor Ghost! is a clear-eyed, deadpan-funny novel about the present that reads like the kind of capital-N novel we don't get enough of anymore. With grace and subtlety, Flynn miraculously depicts themes that rarely inspire grace or subtlety: ambition, death, family, class
Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

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