A. I wouldn’t say I was consciously trying to write a certain way, but yes, I do feel that a lot of writers underestimate teenage readers. Teenagers are among the best kind of readers, because they have the intelligence to understand big ideas, combined with that open-mindedness you tend to shed with age. His girlfriend Leah is the only one who doesn't think he's a weirdo - until, of course, Phillip does something unspeakable to her father. What follows next is a potential recipe for tragedy - though with a rather different ending to the Shakespearean text (I won't give it away). Gender isn’t too much of a problem. But youth is, especially for a male. A woman can imitate a young voice fairly easily, but few men can regress to a time before their voices changed.

A beguiling read, filled with warmth and humour, and a vibrant celebration of the power of books to change lives."

Philip grossly misjudges the people around him and, because he tells the story, we view these people only from his misguided perspective. Nevertheless, by some miracle of narration, we are able to see them more or less as they are: as somewhat limited but basically well-meaning human beings. How does Haig manage both to immerse us in Philip’s point of view and give us an objective understanding of his other characters? The boy kills a man. Definitely not something I would want my kids to read about. Murder by arson. There are also many attempted murder plots throughout the book. In your opinion, how important is it to your readers’ enjoyment that they have read or reread Hamlet recently? Matt Haig has an empathy for the human condition, the light and the dark of it, and he uses the full palette to build his excellent stories.”―NEIL GAIMAN

So when producer Paul Ruben was pondering who should narrate a story told in the voice of an 11-year-old boy, he went for the real thing.The Dead Fathers Club is a wholly unusual reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But the Hamlet parallels — complete with similar plot twists — are worked in so deftly that the reader never quite anticipates where the book will go next. Readers see the world, surprising and strange, through Philip’s eyes. It’s a tangled web of murder and lies, with a boy caught in the middle, trying to make sense of it all. The result is a confused yet perceptive narrator whose responses to the world he inhabits are darkly humorous and sometimes tragic. Haig’s novel reads at a breathless pace (assisted by the absence of commas and apostrophes), his first-person narrative credibly that of a young British boy who takes things at face value. The result is a mysterious and engrossing book for both older children and adults — neither of which will be able to put it down. The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers, Spring 2007 Selection In your opinion, how important is it to your readers’ enjoyment that they have read or reread Hamlet recently?