Poor Ghost!

'Place, belonging, failure, ambition . . . beguilingly readable' Wendy Erskine

By: Gabriel Flynn

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Paperback | 2 July 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

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Paperback

Dimensions(cm)
12.9 x 19.8 x 2.0

Paperback

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'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'

TLS

Luca 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

Industry Reviews

An adept psychologist and a powerful descriptive writer . . . A moving book which will stay with me - Literary Review

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! 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

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.

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

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