Poor Ghost!
On sale
22nd May 2025
Price: £18.99
‘Gabriel Flynn’s work, rich with insight and wit, makes the world newly vivid’
Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
‘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
Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
‘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
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Reviews
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.
Gabriel Flynn's work, rich with insight and wit, makes the world newly vivid. I'm always interested to read what he writes.
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
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
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
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.
Laconic and darkly poignant, Poor Ghost tackles class, grief and narrative perplexity with distinctive dry wit
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
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.
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.
A moving meditation on inheritance and home, and the difficulties that come along with both of those things