Poor Ghost!

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

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