'Compulsive, razor-sharp and deeply tender' Lara Williams
Heartbroken and newly adrift in the world, a young man returns to the city where he grew up, that he thought he'd left behind, to finally confront his father's ghost - a darkly funny debut novel about class, family, and ambition.

'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