Poor Ghost!
'Compulsive, razor-sharp and deeply tender' Lara Williams
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Poor Ghost!
Narrated by:
Maxim Reston
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Maxim Reston
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By:
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Gabriel Flynn
About this listen
Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
'Place, belonging, failure, ambition: this beguilingly readable novel has interesting, fresh things to say on them all'
Wendy Erskine, author of The Benefactors
'A moving meditation on inheritance and home'
Esquire
'A brilliantly simple idea . . . compellingly complicated characters'
Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork
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.
'Laconic and darkly poignant, Poor Ghost! tackles class, grief and narrative perplexity with distinctive dry wit'
Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells©2025 Gabriel Flynn
Critic reviews
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 Club)
Gabriel 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 History)
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)
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 (Julianne Pachico, author of Jungle House)
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. (Elvia Wilk , author of Oval)
Laconic and darkly poignant, Poor Ghost tackles class, grief and narrative perplexity with distinctive dry wit (Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells)
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 (Wendy Erskine, author of The Benefactors)
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.
Authenticity
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But this first novel is worth listening to for its insights into Harvard academia (unpleasantly pretentious and harshly competitive ) , and into the experience of the graduate Mancunian who spends time there. His doomed relationship with an older, sharper academic poet doesn't help him come to terms with the death of his very imperfect father which gnaws away at him. A return to Manchester doesn't help either as he drifts rootless from project to project.
The whole book held my interest but not my emotions. The characters are not attractive neither to themselves nor the listener, and after a while this matters.
Well read.
well worth listening to
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Moving and, ultimately, full of hope
The narration captures the wry humour really well
Moving and wryly funny
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