The Dead Fathers Club: Matt Haig

Product Information

stars rounded up. I love Matt Haig, I really do. This just isn't a favourite as far as his books are concerned. Actually I think it may have spoiled Hamlet for me a bit, which has always been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays. It's a lot more visceral to have the story told you by an eleven year old boy who is struggling with his father's death, than a privileged and somewhat pampered twenty-something prince. It made me quite sad, which bizarrely Hamlet never has before. It's more likely to be something wrong with me... Most entertaining are Philip’s chums, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern equivalents, Ross and Gary. Philip’s exchanges with these interchangeable comic twins are brilliant pitched in adolescent speak . . . [Haig] is also interested in how language breaks down, and frequently his verbal dexterity is at once disorientating and enlightening . . . In his boyishness, Philip shows an all too apparent weakness that very effectively, and often poignantly, exposes the absurdity of revenge. As well as the influence of Roald Dahl in his narrator, Haig’s novel echoes Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time and like that work, this should hold similar appeal for adults and older children alike. . . There is a great deal to admire in his zippy writing, and as for the themes he explores so well, they’re as old as time itself. Johanna Thomas-Carr, City A.M Matt Haig’s prose is quirky, with no apostrophes, liberal use of capital letters, and some creative typesetting. He captures Philip’s young voice with its innocence and acceptance of a new reality. . . Haig has a deft descriptive touch. A church “smelt of God which is the smell of old paper.” When Philip reluctantly answers Uncle Alan, “In an invisible ice cube out of my mouth I said Yes.”. . . a poignant, original, often charming story of a boy struggling in sorrow and misery with all his heart. Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness

Philip is a breathless storyteller who seldom stops for punctuation but whose honesty and innocence, which shine from every sentence, are utterly captivating and heartbreakingly poignant. The result is an absolutely irresistible read. Booklist (starred review) I'm going to keep this review short because I just generally don't have much to say about this book. It was odd and that is my general overall view of it; I literally cannot explain the experience of reading this book without using the word odd. There are no speech marks so everything just flows on and its hard to tell at times what is speech and what isn't. Q. Unlike poor old Hamlet, Philip lives in an age when mental stability comes in little bottles. But the drugs really don’t work, do they? So here's what I LOVED about this book. We all know that Hamlet was the king of indecision, and that he may or may not have been mad. However, his state of mind is always a mystery, due to the perspective of the play. (The soliloquies, in my opinion, only reveal so much).

BookBrowse Review

With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.

Q. The Dead Fathers Club made me think of the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who argued that when people seem to be ‘mad,’ they’re just articulating underlying worries and anxieties that they are prevented, by circumstance or convention, from articulating normally. Would you agree that Philip’s madness (like Hamlet’s) is a kind of coping mechanism?

Reader Reviews

We now owe another debt to Shakespeare, and one to Haig, for re-imagining a tragic masterpiece with such wit, force, and-yes-originality.” Okay, I'll admit - when I started reading this book, I initially released an internal groan. Not another Shakesepeare interpretation, I thought! What more can be said about Hamlet - the play that's been covered literally hundreds of times in previous works? Haig is one of the most inspirational popular writers on mental health of our age and, in his latest novel, he has taken a clever, engaging concept and created a heart-warming story that offers wisdom in the same deceptively simple way as Mitch Albom's best tales" the book leads to a conclusion as tumultuous and powerful as Hamlet’s. While that might sound like exaggerated praise, it’s remarkable how Haig transforms the melancholic prince into a kid, the Danish court into a blue-collar inn and a schoolyard full of brats, the prince’s failed romance into a nearly asexual friendship with all the force of love. Genre fans should also be satisfied, for there’s more of the supernatural here than in the original: multiple ghosts from various eras, trapped in horrors not quite as absolute as fate. Faren Miller, Locus Magazine

And this one especially, on, well, the nature of life itself: “I was thinking Mrs Fell was right. There are choices. You can listen to ghosts or you can not listen to ghosts and you can think what you want to think it is up to you because there are only two things that are true 100 out of 100 times and that is that you live and also that you die and every other thing is not true or false it is a mix. It is both. It is none.” 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. Ho trovato davvero fastidiosa anche la banalizzazione di problematiche e disagi come la salute me Leah confides to Philip that she hates God. By contrast, her father, Mr. Fairview, has turned enthusiastically toward religion after the death of his wife. What commentary does The Dead Fathers Club offer regarding religion, and how does religion influence events and relationships in the novel?The conversation I would love to have with Matt Haig, author of The Dead Fathers Club.* We would be sitting in a small diner drinking our hot beverage of choice.