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"Totally
engrossing"
Stephen Daldry,
director of The Hours and Billy
Elliot
The
Dead Fathers Club is out now in paperback
in the UK (Vintage). It's published by Viking
(Penguin) in the US. There is also
an audiobook available, see here.
The movie option has gone to Harry Potter
producer David Heyman at Heyday Films.
Read the reviews here
or watch my tour of Newark-on-Trent (where
the book is set) here.
The
inside cover says:
A
hilarious and touching novel narrated by an
eleven-year old boy who is visited by his
father’s ghost
Eleven-year-old
Philip Noble has a big problem.
His dad, who was killed in a car accident,
appears as a bloodstained ghost at his own
funeral and introduces Philip to the Dead
Fathers Club. The club, whose members were
all murdered, gathers outside the Castle and
Falcon, the local pub that Philip’s
family owns and lives above. Philip learns
that the person responsible for his father’s
death is his Uncle Alan. When Philip realizes
that Uncle Alan has designs on his mom and
the family pub, Philip decides that something
must be done. But avenging his father's death
is a much bigger job than he anticipated,
especially when he is caught up by the usual
distractions of childhood—a pretty girl,
wayward friends, school bullies, and his own
self-doubt.
The Dead Fathers Club is an incredibly funny,
imaginative, and quirky update of Hamlet that
will appeal to fans of The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-Time and establish
Matt Haig as a young writer of great talent.
I
say:
The Dead Fathers Club is by far the most personal
novel of the three I've written. I'm sure
I'll never be able to write anything like
it again. It nearly gave me a nervous breakdown,
to be honest. The voice inside Philip's head
- breathless, unpunctuated, hyper-sensitive,
scared, immature - is the voice inside my
own head a lot of the time, and many of his
experiences are drawn from my own life, such
as panic disorder.
For the other stuff I've written I've had
to structure it and think all the characters
through before putting pen to paper. It's
like feeling your way through an underground
mine with intersecting tunnels. With this
it was the opposite. It was there all at once
and I had to write it down as fast as I could,
feeling rather than thinking the whole structure,
and only coming up for air once in a while.
This meant having absolutely no life for four
months, living on cereal and toast, getting
through pens at a rate of one a day, and having
surreal dreams about tropical fish and Roman
Emperors.
To
see the Viking reading guide click here.
There's a Random House UK mini-site here.
If
you'd like to read the first few pages of
The Dead Fathers Club then click here.
Here
are some highlights from the US launch of
the novel:
-
Top 20 Book
Sense February Pick
- Borders Original Voices Selection
- Barnes & Noble
Discover Great New Writers
- Starred reviews in
Kirkus Review, Publishing News and Booklist
-
National and regional coverage - see the reviews
here and the articles
here.
You
can buy the UK version here
or US version here.
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