About the Book
'Place, belonging, failure, ambition: this beguilingly readable novel has interesting, fresh things to say on them all'Wendy Erskine, author of The Benefactors'A clear-eyed, deadpan-funny novel about the present'Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts'A moving meditation on inheritance and home'Esquire'Acidly funny'TLSLuca is back in Manchester, returning from Harvard with little more than a broken heart and a failed academic career. Desperate for money and still clinging to his literary dreams, he finds work as a ghost writer. Andy, a local man with a colourful history, wants Luca to write his story. But the assignment is a personal one: Andy has the same condition Luca's dad suffered from, before he took his own life. Now, balancing his artistic ambitions with Andy's demands, Luca must confront the past he thought he'd escaped, and the failures that have led him back home.'Gabriel Flynn's work, rich with insight and wit, makes the world newly vivid'Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History'A brilliantly simple idea and compellingly complicated characters'Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork
About the Author :
Gabriel Flynn was born in Seattle, Washington, 1991 and grew up in Manchester. He was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize in 2020, and and his work has appeared in Five Dials, Minor Literature[s], and Best British Short Stories. Poor Ghost! is his first novel.
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.
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
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
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
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
