Q. In The Dead Fathers Club you write from an adolescent’s perspective. Why does this age group hold such a fascination for authors? Turns out a British narrator and friend who had just judged a BBC-sponsored competition to find “the Young Voice of Bath” recommended the winner, Andrew Dennis, who just happened to be 12. With Phillip, it's explored in much more detail - grief, resentment, inability to act, the sense of isolation - it's all there, in gloriously modern terms. What's also utterly magnificent is the possibility that the father's ghost doesn't exist at all - and that Phillip is suffering some sort of mental breakdown after losing a loved one. This puts a totally fresh spin on things, which I thought was really clever. It made me start wondering - what if that was the case in the original Hamlet? What if Claudius was actually totally innocent? Thought provoking stuff!

and I knew that he hadnt done anything wrong because he was a policeman and policemen only say sorry if something very bad has happened. So I knew right then what the pain in my stomach was. And I saw the policeman leave and the hat was in his hand but not on his chest any more like the Bad News had been in there and set free. And I saw Mum and she saw me but didnt see me properly and she went to the corner of the hall by the radiator and sat down in a ball and cried and shook her head in her hands and said No no no no no and everywhere round us looked the same but bigger and I wanted to go and tell her it was OK but that would have been a lie and so I just sat there and did nothing. The main character walks in on his mother and his uncle doing the jim jam (if you catch my drift) and it is described in horrific unsettling detail. Nothing I would want my kids to read.An update on the Hamlet story, this reads much like "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime" (I think that's right) with a yound narrator set to avenge his father's death at the hands of his uncle. And while that voice worked well for the autistic narrator of "Nightime" at times I felt this kid was really stupid for an 11 year old. Perhaps my standards are too high for preteens or perhaps he was just overwhlemed with grief, but that's not my point. Except it might be my point, because I think his stupidity was one of the things keeping me from truly embracing this story. And you might argue that was part of the point, that death and the real world is very confusing for kids, but I digress. A. No. It wasn’t my original intention. I experimented with various different ways of expressing Philip’s state of mind but this one somehow worked best. And thankfully, my editor didn’t have a problem with it. 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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald said when he wrote he felt like he was holding his breath and swimming under water. With The Dead Fathers Club it was certainly written at quite a breathless, intense level, and came from a place I can’t easily locate. But once I had the voice, it was there and I was able to see everything through Philip’s eyes. Leah Fairview– The former girlfriend of Phillip is sister to Dane Fairview. Her mother died when Leah was young and her father is accidentally murdered by Phillip. At the end of the novel, Phillip saves her from committing suicide Matt Haig’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Sydney Morning Herald. The Dead Fathers Club is his American debut. He lives in Leeds, England.And then they went into the office and shut the door and I could hear nothing for ages and then I heard Mum. She was howling like a WOLF and the noise hurt my stomach and I closed my eyes to try and hear the policeman and all he was saying was Im sorry and he kept on saying it For a character who engages in as much internal monologuing as Philip, there’s initially very little ambivalence over his mission. There’s no moralizing about whether it’s right to take Alan’s life, but maybe that makes sense. Life is simpler at 11: Philip loved his father, his father’s ghost says Alan must die, and so Alan must die. The problem, though, is that his father’s ghost – who at first appears to be omniscient and gifted with preternatural awareness – makes an increasing number of inaccurate predictions, some of which have disastrous consequences. And this brings Philip to a crossroads: Is his father an tortured spirit or just a spiteful douchebag? And if it’s the latter, is his death still worth avenging? Philip Noble is an eleven-year-old in crisis. His pub landlord father has died in a road accident and his mother is succumbing to the greasy charms of her dead husband’s brother. The remaining certainties of Philip’s life crumble away when his father’s ghost appears to declare that he was murdered. We follow the narration from Phillip's point of view. There are no punctuation signs, as one could expect from a boy of that age, and Phillip's inner thoughts are hilarious sometimes, as well as his mental processes of what's happening. We see his struggle between trying to save his father's ghost from some eternal terrors, with the imposed deadline of his father's birthday, which is the last day to kill him and complete his revenge, and the fact that he doesn't really know if he wants to kill his uncle.