'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

'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

"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! 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." - Literary Review

"A moving meditation on inheritance and home, and the difficulties that come along with both of those things" - 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" - Review 31