Poor Ghost!

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 ClubGabriel 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 HistorySharp 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 MineIn 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 NightworkPoor 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 HousePoor 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 OvalLaconic and darkly poignant, Poor Ghost tackles class, grief and narrative perplexity with distinctive dry wit – Leon Craig, author of Parallel HellsPlace, 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 BenefactorsReinforced 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. – Hassan Akram * Literary Review *A moving meditation on inheritance and home, and the difficulties that come along with both of those things – The 14 Best Beach Reads for Your Summer Trip * 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 – Hugh Foley * 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 LeipzigAn 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

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 his work has appeared in Five Dials, Minor Literature[s], and Best British Short Stories. Poor Ghost! is his first novel.

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