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    The Dead Fathers Club
    The Dead Fathers Club
    The Dead Fathers Club
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Dead Fathers Club

    Written by Matt Haig

    Narrated by Andrew Dennis

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Eleven-year-old Philip Noble has a big problem. His dad has appeared to him as a member of the Dead Fathers Club, a club for "ghost dads" whose murders are unavenged. His father's road accident, it turns out, was no accident at all.

    Uncle Alan is responsible for his dad's death, and if Philip doesn't succeed in killing his uncle before his dad's birthday, just ten weeks away, his dad's spirit will never rest.

    So begins Philip's quest to avenge his dad and to save his mum from the greasy clutches of Uncle Alan, who seems intent on taking his dad's place in their lives. But Philip finds himself both uneasy of his mission and distrustful of the ghost that claims to be his father. Plus, he's distracted by Leah Polonius, the gorgeous daughter of Uncle Alan's Bible-bashing business partner. What's a young lad to do?

    The Dead Fathers Club gives more than a nod towards Hamlet. Hilarious and unpredictable, The Dead Father's Club is full of poignant insights into the strange workings of the world as seen through the eyes of a child.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJan 8, 2007
    ISBN9781598873542
    The Dead Fathers Club
    Author

    Matt Haig

    MATT HAIG is the bestselling author of The Midnight Library. His most recent work is the non-fiction title The Comfort Book. He has written two other books of non-fiction and six highly acclaimed novels for adults, as well as many books for children. Matt Haig has sold more than a million books worldwide. His work has been translated into more than forty languages.

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    Reviews for The Dead Fathers Club

    3.5/5

    47 ratings27 reviews

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    • 4/5
      When Philip Noble's father dies, he has trouble adjusting even before his mother starts dating his uncle and he begins to see his father's ghost. Plot sound a bit familiar? It should, as author Matt Haig has taken as his jumping off point the bare bones of Shakespeare's Hamlet. However, it is what he does with those bones that makes this a truly enjoyable read. In his eleven-year old protagonist, Haig has created one of the most authentic voices in recent memory. It amazed me that an adult can so clearly remember (or mimic) how one felt and acted and talked as a child, but Haig does this amazingly well. Philip is obviously grieving for his father and resents the changes that his father's death cause in his life. Not the least of these changes is that his uncle moves in and starts dating his mother. When Philip starts to see visions of his dead father that tell him to avenge his death, we know he is in troubled waters. The questions surrounding the death of Philip's father add an element of mystery to the book. In a way, this echoed The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time for me, both for its family relations and pseudo-mystery to be solved. Philip is like a non-autistic version of that book's hero, Christopher Boone. Paying homage to Hamlet without being boxed in by a rigid retelling, Dead Father's Club is a great book.
    • 4/5
      A fresh, original take on Hamlet. Excellent performance on the audiobook, by a young man the age of the narrator.
    • 4/5
      The audio made it much easier to read! The book itself lacks punctuation, etc (purposely) as it is meant to be read in the voice of a child. However, that made it almost impossible to read so the audio was much better. It is written with elements alluding to hamlet, so beware, it IS a tragedy.
    • 5/5
      My friend who runs ChicksDigBooks.com told me that this book was awesome and also had ghosts in it like my novel. And it did! And the thing about the ghosts here is that they are tricky. Right now the ghost in my novel is very earnest....but what if the ghost was tricky? That would be interesting....
    • 4/5
      Eleven-year-old Philip Noble has a big problem. It all begins when his dad appears as a ghost at his own funeral and introduces Philip to the Dead Fathers Club. Philip learns the truth about ghosts: the only people who end up as ghosts have been murdered. So begins Philip's quest to avenge his dad. Characterization:* Philip is prone to panic attacks, has all the problems an adolescent experiences and this draws the reader to him. Storyline:* Strongly based on Hamlet although the retelling is fresh, Does Philip's girlfriend drown? Not gonna tell you.* Not as tragic as Hamlet Pacing: * Told in adolescence, breathless, prose that doesn't stop for punctuation * The prose is what makes it similar to The curious incident of the dog in the nightime
    • 4/5
      Fascinating character study similar to a Confederacy of Dunces....I really enjoyed the similes
    • 1/5
      According to the quote on the back cover, this book promised to be "Humorous and original....like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"What it SHOULD have said was "Humorously UNoriginal...unabashedly plagiarizes The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"This book would not be in existence if the author hadn't first read (then blatantly copied) Mark Haddon's novel. If Haddon hasn't yet filed an intellectual property lawsuit, he should.
    • 4/5
      Philip Noble, a British schoolboy, is convinced that his dead father's ghost is appearing to him and seeking to convince him to kill his Uncle Alan, who the ghost says is responsible for tampering with his car's brakes and thus causing his fatal accident. The book is well-written, though the author chooses to omit apostrophes and quotations marks. I was disturbed by the turn which the book took at the end, when Philip accidentally causes the death of an innocent man in his quest to kill Uncle Alan, and when Alan's complicity in the father's death is called into question. Philip seems to have decided by the end of the book that the ghost was not real, but we are left to ponder how Philip is going to deal with causing the death of an innocent man.
    • 3/5
      Disturbing and at times darkly humorous, Dead Fathers Club is a grittily and sometimes gorily real portrayal of a young boy struggling to maintain his sense of right and wrong as the adults around him fail him time and time again. Philip, an immature eleven-year-old growing up in Newark, has his very average world ripped apart when his father is kills in a traffic accident and his mother rapid succumbs to the dubious attractions of oily Uncle Alan. His father’s ghost, who no-one but Philip can see or hear, rides to the rescue, offering Philip a way of ‘saving’ his mother and assuring his father of eternal rest and peace. But, bullied at school and neglected at home, Philip is increasingly torn between his sense of right and wrong and loyalty to his father: he is manipulated further and further into a mental and behavioural decline.This isn’t a bad book: Haig has a good story to tell, but he delivers it with a workmanlike detachment, that offers little to engage the reader. An initially engaging style, if one can get over the mildly pretentious tone, the story becomes increasingly and wretchedly predictable. Leah, the serene and slightly mystical centre of Philip’s awakening sexuality, provides some light reveal but is left undeveloped as other, less interesting, characters take centre stage. My main reaction to this book was ambivalence: it’s good, but not that good and mildly derivative with strong reminders of the numerous stories of troubled childhood which seem to fill the bookshops at the moment. If that genre of fiction appeals to you, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, or We Need To Talk About Kevin are both much better. Dead Fathers Club is a depressingly sad picture of modern childhood in a world where everyone seems to believe that something has gone wrong. Pity the reader who takes it too seriously.
    • 3/5
      I don't know exactly how I feel about this book. I can't say I loved it, but I definitely kept wanting to read it. Once I got used to the way the book was written it was an easy read. I kind of liked the slightly blurry way the story was told, from the perspective of a adolescent boy. The ending of the book was my favorite.
    • 4/5
      I just finished Matt Haig's semi-adolescent novel The Dead Father's Club. I'm still formulating my opinion of it, so bear with me. When you take a healthy dose of Hamlet and mix it with an obvious borrow from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (and by "obvious borrow" I mean: too recent a bestseller to be completely a coincidence in narrating choices), you end up with a story of a young boy, Philip, haunted by the ghost of his father, killed in a car accident, who claims it was really murder, done in by his brother, Philip's uncle, who has designs on his wife, Philip's mother, etc. all told in a stream of consciousness narrative that is strikingly juvenile yet oddly compelling.A word or two about that juvenile style: the lack of apostrophes bothered me. Even an eleven-year-old would know how to use them. I spend too much time trying to be grammatically precise in my own writing to feel at all home reading an entire book with such a ploy. Besides, the difference between he'll and hell causes some confusion when you remove that little hash mark in the middle.The Hamlet references excited me at first (having spent so much time studying the play, myself). Characters with easily identifiable names kept popping up. Leah stands in for Ophelia. Ross and Gary are obvious replacements for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There is a character named Dane (although he represents Laertes). Even the family's last name, Noble, is a reference to the nobility of Claudius and Gertrude. (Although I can find no connection between the name "Philip" and "Hamlet" so I guess the writer stopped short of referencing all of the names.)There is a play-within-a-play to prove the murder theory. Philip brings home a rental DVD one night to watch with his uncle-father and aunt-mother entitled, The Murder of Gonzago, which is, as far as I can tell, a re-enactment of Hamlet itself. This is supposed to inspire feelings of guilt in Uncle Alan, who does get up in the middle of it, say something about needing some light, and walk out.There is the accidental murder of Polonius.Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seek out Hamlet to glean the truth from him.Ophelia attempts suicide.This is where the similarities end. Haig evidently felt that he needed his own ending, and this is where I began to really have trouble with it. If you're going to rip off Hamlet (sorry, I mean pay homage to), at least do it all the way, not half-assed. I don't think such a classic tale needs an updated ending. I liked the modern re-telling. I mean, he didn't go Gus Van Sant on us. It was a clever idea, I would have liked to have seen how the eleven-year-old dealt with the tragic ending.For that matter, I would have liked to have seen any character development at all. Nobody in that book changed more than a hint throughout. Philip was weak at the beginning and hadn't changed much by the end, despite dealing with the questionably real, presumably imaginary, force of his dead father and, oh, several other things as well, such as grand theft auto and arson. His mother was pretty weak, too, since she was willing to marry someone else inside of 2 months after her first husband's death, while watching her son slip into madness at the same time. Uncle Alan was strong and suspiciously brutish almost to the very end. The other boys on the playground were all bullies, always. Only Leah showed any dymanic range at all, and she wasn't even in 90% of the book.And where was Horatio? My favorite character from the play. The point-of-view of the watcher, the one whom the audience identifies with? Without him, Hamlet would have been almost too foreign to understand.I did like the voice. I feel like he captured what a real 11 year-old would be like. Certainly he reminded me of myself at that age (minus most of the murderous mood swings, of course). And overall, I liked the book, too. If nothing else, it filled my quota of Hamlet-related literature for the next year or so. Would I have written it differently? Absolutely, but then again, I'm not a published writer, so who am I to speak?
    • 2/5
      This book contains no commas, apostrophes or quotation marks, a pointless liteary gimmick that quickly grows old. I'd read some favorable reviews and began with high hopes, but they were crushed flat as I progressed through the story. The Dead Fathers Club is othing but a palid, pretentious take on an age-old classic. It wasn't even funny.
    • 3/5
      The Dead Fathers Club is a modern-day adaptation of Hamlet. Phillip Noble, the 11-year old narrator, has just lost his father to a car accident, and now sees him as a ghost. His father accuses Phillip's Uncle Alan for murdering him and trying to now control Phillip and his mother. His father tells Phillip that the only way he can rest in peace is if Phillip gets revenge for his father. Thus begins Phillip's journey to discover the truth about his uncle and attempt to get revenge for his father before his uncle kills him and/or his mother. The book is written as if it was by an 11-year old with poor punctuation, repeated run-on sentences, and observations of an adult world through the eyes of one so young. While that style is not my favorite, Haig did a decent job. The book itself leaves you guessing until the end, and beyond, since there is little resolution. While written as though it was by an 11-year old, I would say the novel is more suited for 13-14 year olds given language and some sexuality that parents of children 10 and under may not approve of. My rating for the book stems from the book just not being my cup of tea in terms of style as well as the very open ending. Overall I'd recommend it as a bit of light summer reading.
    • 2/5
      Philip's father has just died and suddenly he sees his ghost. Philip's dad says he has been murdered and Philip must get revenge or his dad will be stuck a ghost forever. I liked the idea of this book, the struggle to do what is right and wrong and how a young boy deals with his father's sudden death. But for me the book fell short. Something annoyed me from the start (the fact that when people were talking, what they were saying wasn't in quotes) and I just couldn't get past it for the rest of the book.
    • 4/5
      This story, set in modern-day England and narrated by an eleven year-old boy, is a clever and subtle retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The story opens when Philip, the Hamlet-narrator, sees his father's ghost after the funeral. His father's ghost informs him that he was murdered by Uncle Alan, and that he will be stuck in eternal torment unless Philip kills his uncle before his father's next birthday in a few months. When I say that I don't want to give more than that away, you may think to yourself "but it's Hamlet! I know what happens!" Trust me, the story is unique enough that it caught me off guard and made me question the plot more than once. In the end, it's Philip that makes this book so worth reading. The writing style really makes you feel like you're listening to an eleven year-old tell a story, and it didn't take long for me to really worry for this poor, young, grief-stricken kid. This is one book that really stuck with me. Be warned, though. The ending has a cliff-hanger feel, so if you like all your ends tied up neatly, you might not enjoy this particular book.
    • 3/5
      Bizarre ending. Really.
    • 5/5
      This may be one of the best audio books I've listened to in some time. At its heart, this is a familiar story--a boy's father dies, and the ghost swings by to accuse the uncle. Who is now moving in on Mom. Ghost makes son swear revenge, etc. Yes, it's Hamlet, only we're not in seventeenth-century Denmark. We're outside London, present-day, and the boy in question is twelve years old.

      The story is told in long, rambling sentences with lots of repetition, which really works for the tone and voice of the book. The narrator on the audio is Andrew Dennis, who at 12 years old has already won a BBC Audiobooks "Voice of Bath" competition, and he does an amazing job with reading Philip Noble's story. He's grieving, confused, angry, and desperate, and every single emotion comes through in the audio version.

      Whether you read reviews, plot synopses, or what, literate readers will recognize this as straight-up Hamlet, which does lead to few surprises down the line. (Aside from the Noble family themselves, two of Philip's friends are siblings Leah and Dane.) Still, the plot pulls along, and the reader is just left hoping, hoping, something will be different from the source material. (Whether it is or isn't is not for me to tell, though!)
    • 3/5
      I found myself entertained and engrossed by Matt Haig's style of writing, and listening to the gifted narrator was a pleasure. The modern Hamlet parody was excellent.
    • 4/5
      This creative contemporary retelling of "Hamlet" is delightful and, for the most part, engrossing. As a big fan of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," it's probably no surprise that I loved the narrative voice Matt Haig created for Philip, his young protagonist. Viewing the world and its many sad twists through the eyes of a kid provides some neat insights. Some of Philip's observations are downright hilarious. Adding to my enjoyment was the fact that I chose to experience this story via audiobook. Reader Andrew Dennis, a 12-year-old British boy, did a stellar job. In fact, I think it's one of the best narrations of a book that I've experienced in several years -- and I've listened to at least a couple hundred.I tried not to over-analyze the "Hamlet" twists that permeate the saga, choosing instead to enjoy this action-packed story on its own contemporary merits. The ending left me wondering how Philip would cope with one particular tragedy, a loose end that I found unsettling. But overall, "The Dead Fathers Club" is inventive and well-executed.
    • 4/5
      Philip is understandably distraught after his father dies. He is even more so when his father's ghost starts talking to him and telling him things about his uncle. According to the ghost, his uncle killed his father and now Philip has to kill the uncle to get his father's revenge and keep him from descending into the "terrors". Philip is unsure about this, but he doesn't like his uncle moving in on his mum and so he may just go through with it. If this sounds familiar, it is as this is an adaptation of Shakespear's Hamlet. Philip narrates the story in the very authentic voice of a confused 11 year old. It really felt like you were in his head experiencing it with him and hoping it wouldn't end as badly as the real Hamlet does. Haig does a masterful job of recreating this old story in a new way. I highly reccomend this book, though some of the heavy stuff dealt with can make it a bit of a downer in places so keep that in mind.
    • 3/5
      Huh. Not really sure what to say about this book except that I am glad I got it at 25% off. I read it in about 4 hours...And I don't think much of it will stay with me except page 309-310...which is a rather nice part about the levels of human awareness.Huh.
    • 3/5
      The Dead Father's Club is passable, but is not a particularly memorable retelling of Hamlet.Haig moves the plot elements of Hamlet to a modern British setting, with the part of Hamlet played by a confused 11 year old boy whose dad has just died in a car accident. The conflict is set up to be read on two levels- the classic level where Phillip's dad goads him on to seek revenge on his Uncle Alan and on another level where perhaps Phillip is making this all up in order to deal with the tumultous changes in his life.The novel starts out well humanizing and modernizing the characters, but I feel like it doesn't earn or realistically portray Phillip's later drastic actions. They feel obligatory (to follow Hamlet) rather than naturally flowing from character development. Furthermore, the realistic portrayal of how these actions impact the real world is somewhat glossed over, especially in regards to Leah (fill-in for Ophelia), I felt. Ultimately, I find this attempt to be true to two sources (the original and to modern-day reality) ended up watering down the emotional depths of both- and giving poor resolution to both interpretations of the central conflict.
    • 4/5
      Written partially in a stream-of-consciousness style, partly just like a young teen might think-write (and without apostrophes or quotation marks), this is a modern-day version of Hamlet. It is not identical to Shakespeare's play, but certainly based on the play and contains many obvious and subtle references (former: protagonist's father has died and the ghost visits his son; latter: names like the fish, Gertie after Gertrude in the play). The style of writing is not unlike The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but less on the spectrum. It is quirky but it works really well. Clearly it was carefully crafted, and the stress, horror, conflict of the characters shines through with showing, not telling. Very emotional and clever. It has its own ending and leaves much of the interpreting to the reader. Brilliant.
    • 2/5
      This book had everything going for it, great cover, Border's Original, great premise (modern take on Hamlet, protagonist sees dead fathers, including his own). And it started off good. But then it just became more and more boring. I know Hamlet already and this concept was strong but the author didn't do enough with it. Sigh.
    • 3/5
      Philip Noble is thirteen years old. He lives with his mum above the pub--the Castle and Falcon--that she and his dad ran together before his dad was killed in a car accident. Philip keeps fish and is interested in Roman history. Philip's a pretty normal kid, until his Dad's Ghost (Philip always capitalizes Important Nouns) appears to him at his own funeral. Dad's Ghost tells Philip that his death wasn't an accident, but rather, murder, and that dad's own brother, Uncle Alan, did it. Not only that, but Uncle Alan has designs on Philip's mum.Does that last bit sound familiar? Yes, The Dead Fathers Club takes its major plot ideas from Hamlet, up to and including Dad's Ghost's plea to Philip--thirteen year old Philip!--to kill Uncle Alan so that Dad can rest in peace. Dad's Ghost tells Philip about the Dead Fathers Club, and shows him the pathetic ghosts of murdered fathers, waiting for their loved ones to exact revenge so they can move on. Oh, and not to put too much pressure on you, son, but dad will suffer The Terrors for all eternity if you don't take care of this.Kind of a tall order for a scrawny and insecure kid.The publisher's dust jacket copy calls The Dead Fathers Club "incredibly funny, imaginative, and quirky," and I will grant them imaginative and quirky. Haig has pulled off a real tour de force with this first person narrative; it's perfectly, painfully believable as coming from the mind of a scared little kid. The punctuation is minimal, and the lack of commas and quotation marks create a breathless, headlong rush of a read. Philip's voice is fresh and charming, his use of ALL CAPITALS for emphasis and phonetic renderings of how he hears words or expressions with which he's unfamiliar are sometimes startling and often delightful.However, this book is only funny if the spectacle of a possibly unhinged child who believes his father's ghost is telling him to commit murder is funny to you. I spent nearly the entire time I was reading hoping fervently that Philip would heed his teacher's advice to "Trust the living Philip. Trust the living."
    • 4/5
      The Dead Fathers Club are ghosts of Dads in Newark who meet near the Pub because most of them went there because it is the oldest Pub in town.They dont meet inside because ghosts flicker out more easily inside than outside and it makes no difference when you are a ghost because you dont feel the cold and your legs dont get tired from standing up.Philip is 11 when his publican father dies in a car crash and the story kicks off when his father's ghost appears to him at his own wake and tells him that he needs to avenge his death. This retelling of Hamlet is set in Newark in Nottinghamshire and told in Philip's own words as he struggles with grief, hatred for his uncle and problems at school while he tries to decide whether he should avenge his father to save him from the Terrors that afflict unavenged ghosts. The Registry Office looks like nothing.It is just a building with red bricks that you dont notice. This is on purpose so God doesnt put lightning out of his fingers and kill the people who get married again who lied to him in church.
    • 4/5
      Let me say at the outset that I am dubious of anyone who tries to revisit Shakespeare. The author invites comparison and is inevitably found lacking. I was pleasantly suprised to find that this is not the case for the Dead Fathers Club. Haig essentially retells the story of Hamlet but Hamlet is now an 11 year-old, modern, British Boy. He starts having visions of his dead father who tells him to kill his Uncle Alan who is slowly trying to take over his father's pub, The Castle and Falcon. Haig creates convincing voices while winking at Shakespeare. For example, when Uncle Alan has new ideas for running the pub he describes local ales as "flat, stale and unprofitable." He dots the text through out with these references to Hamlet and does an interesting spin on the ending. Some may find the lack of punctuation and typographical choices a little precious but I didn't mind them. It was an entertaining read.