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New from Tatiana de Rosnay, author of 'Sarah's Key'
A haunting journey through the past to a truth they may not want to know…
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New Author
Interviews |
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Anne Fortier
Join Anne Fortier as she discusses her first novel, Juliet, how she came to write it in English even though she's Danish, why she set her version of Romeo and Juliet in Siena when Shakespeare set his in Verona, and why her mother was exploring how to rob a bank in Siena to help with her writing.
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Michael J. Sandel
Michael J. Sandel’s "Justice" course is one of the most popular and influential at Harvard. Interested readers can take a seat in the lecture hall alongside Harvard College students, thanks to a 2009 PBS lecture series....
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Carol Lynch Williams
Carol Lynch Williams discussed The Chosen One, and what inspired her to write a book about polygamy.
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C. W. Gortner
A video interview with C.W. Gortner in which he talks about his 2010 historical novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici.
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Summary and Book Reviews |
The Dead Fathers Club: Summary and book reviews of The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig, plus links to an excerpt from The Dead Fathers Club and a biography of Matt Haig. |
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Book Summary
A BookBrowse Favorite Book |
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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’s father tells him that Uncle Alan killed him and he must avenge his death. When Philip realizes that Uncle Alan has designs on his mom and the family pub, Philip decides that something must be done. But it’s 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 a riveting, imaginative, and quirky update of Shakespeare’s great tragedy that will establish Matt Haig as a young writer of great talent and imagination.
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| BOOK REVIEWS |
BookBrowse
Philip, who pours out his story in a style unhindered by punctuation or the rules of grammar, is an immensely likeable character. Spending 300-pages seeing through his innocent and honest eyes as he relates his tragically-comic story is an experience not to be missed. His story is actually more tragic than anything Hamlet had to deal with. In fact, my overwhelming urge on finishing The Dead Fathers Club was to apologize to Philip for laughing at his predicament, but it is impossible not to as Haig has a keen eye for the blackly comic.
Full Review  (members only, 1228 words).
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Media Reviews
Library Journal
What makes this work effective is that the narrative captures the anxiety of a timid boy, ridiculed by everyone, who must decide whether and how to kill his charismatic uncle. Hamlet never faced such difficulties.
Booklist - Michael Cart
Starred Review. Given to panic attacks, 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.
Publisher's Weekly
Starred Review. Haig does an enviable job of leavening a sad premise through the words and actions of a charming, resilient young man.
Kirkus 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.
San Francisco Chronicle - Reyhan Harmanci
One of the joys (for those familiar with Hamlet) is figuring out at what points Haig's work diverges. Phillip is an unreliable narrator, but it isn't until close to the ending that you begin to wonder just how unreliable .... Through Phillip, and the struggles Phillip has with his father's ghost, we see the cruelty of death, the desire to make sense out of an nonsensical event. The Dead Fathers Club is full of funny moments, but the ending reveals the dark heart of Hamlet's story.
USA Today - Susan Kelly
Haig cleverly reinvents this 400-year-old tragedy as a 21st-century morality tale inhabited by schoolchildren, barmaids and mechanics, and it's fun to look for the parallels between the two works. . . The story's greatest strength, however, is Philip's perspective as narrator. Haig effectively runs Philip's words and thoughts together with an economy of punctuation, spliced with details that a child would notice, to create the voice of an anxious child
The Guardian - Gerard Woodward
The child's perspective also brings out the absurd comedy of Shakespeare's tragedy; most of all it allows Haig to indulge his innocently acute eye for detail and his delightfully weird imagination.
The Daily Mail, UK
Humorous and original … [it] will appeal to adults and children alike.
Sunday Express - Nick Ryan
The Dead Fathers Club is poignant, funny, innocent, touching has an underdog and enough nasty undertones to please the most cynical mind - all of it written from a child's perspective. . . This novel is both funny, surreal and at times full of very black humour: a fine piece of work by a talented and clearly imaginative young writer.
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Recent Reader Reviews
Rated  of 5
by dudeman
awesome
This book is awesome! Hilarious, heartfelt, and easily relateable. It opens up the reader's imagination and ability to picture things in the mind. You never get tired while reading it. It keeps your reading sense tingling!
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| Editor's Choice |
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Mockingjay
Suzanne Collins |
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Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins’s groundbreaking The Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year. |
Wife of the Gods
Kwei Quartey |
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Lyrical and captivating, Kwei Quartey’s debut novel brings to life the majesty and charm of Ghana–from the capital city of Accra to a small community where long-buried secrets are about to rise to the surface. |
Brodeck
Phillipe Claudel |
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Set in an unnamed time and place, Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar, myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck. |
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
C. W. Gortner |
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From the fairy-tale châteaux of the Loire Valley to the battlefields of the wars of religion to the mob-filled streets of Paris, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is the extraordinary untold journey of one of the most maligned and misunderstood women ever to be queen. |
Bonobo Handshake
Vanessa Woods |
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A young woman follows her fiancé to war-torn Congo to study extremely endangered bonobo apes - who teach her a new truth about love and belonging. |
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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak |
| The Book Thief was an astounding book! I am 13 and have read this book twice. The first was assigned, but I loved it so much I had to read it again ...
read more |
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Brooklyn Bridge by Karen Hesse |
| I'm a ten year old girl who recently read this book. It was a deep, yet fun confection about growing up in the early 1900's, the time where New York ...
read more |
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Zeitoun by Dave Eggers |
| This book is important, yet has been largely overlooked by reviewers and book clubs. It's not just a history of Hurricane Katrina, but a personal ...
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Book Club Recommendations
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| Latest BookBrowse News |
Booker shortlist announced (Sep 07 2010)
The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has been announced:
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Possibility of combined ALA and BEA book shows from 2012 (Sep 07 2010)
Reed Exhibitions, parent company of BookExpo America, is in discussion with the American Library Association (ALA) about taking over the organization's two...
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