Poor Ghost!

By: Gabriel Flynn

'A compulsive, razor-sharp and deeply tender novel'
Lara Williams, author of Supper Club

'Rich with insight and wit'
Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

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.

©2025 Gabriel Flynn (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

'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' (Tim MacGabhann, author of Call Him Mine)

'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' (Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork)