GHOST GRANDAD: MOSTLY YES
A NOVEL BY CHRISSY IDLE
COULD YOU LEAVE BEHIND MORE THAN PHOTOGRAPHS?
Dead is one thing. Gone is another. He’s just moved to the cloud.
Marcus Whitfield is dying.
His granddaughter is five.
And he has no intention of leaving her future entirely to algorithms.
So Marcus decides to leave her something rather more useful than memories: himself.
This grandfather isn’t remotely ready to stop having an opinion, even beyond the grave. A funny, absurd extrapolation of where AI could take us in the very near future.
“The Answers” is a free guided questionnaire to help you record the answers to questions your family may one day wish they’d asked. Start writing your story.
himsel
THE STORY
Grandad has one last project
Marcus Whitfield has only months left to live.
He is clever, stubborn and distinctly unimpressed by the prospect of his five-year-old granddaughter growing up in a world where technology increasingly does the thinking for us.
So he builds something extraordinary.
A whisper-thin piece of wearable technology that will allow her to ask Grandad what he thinks — long after Grandad is gone.
That, at least, is the plan
Unfortunately, humans get involved.
There’s Sophia, Marcus’s spectacularly successful influencer daughter. There’s a nearly-fiancé with problems of his own. There’s a five-year-old capable of asking precisely the questions nobody anticipated.
And then there’s a spectacularly ill-advised plan.
Ghost Grandad is speculative fiction with its feet firmly planted in a very human family: funny, fierce, occasionally ridiculous and ultimately asking one rather uncomfortable question.
If technology could allow someone we love to remain with us forever… should it?
What early readers are saying.
“Funny, weird in the best way, and just creepy enough to make you look twice at your Alexa.”
★★★★★
Paige T – NetGalley reviewer
“A dying grandfather uploads more than memories in this witty, eerie near-future tale of family, AI, and one little girl worth staying for.”
★★★★★
Abigail L – Librarian, via NetGalley
“A smart, warm, slightly spooky read about family, screens, and the difference between being watched and being truly seen.”
★★★★★
Sue E – NetGalley reviewer
“I have just been laughing out loud! It would make great TV. Brilliant. Really, really enjoyed it.”
★★★★★
Jen H
“There is humour in the book and a gentleness throughout it. I enjoyed the ending of the story and found it clever and satisfying.”
★★★★★
Lorna B
“Just finished your book!! Utterly brilliant!!”
★★★★★
Anne M
FREE COMPANION PDF
THE BOOK MAY END.
THE QUESTIONS DON’T.
Ghost Grandad: The Answers
If someone you loved could ask you questions after you were gone, what would you want them to know?
Not just names.
Not just dates.
Not the respectable version that makes it into the family tree.
The other stuff.
What makes you laugh. What you believe. What you got spectacularly wrong. How you behave in a crisis. The advice you’d give and the advice you completely ignored yourself.
Ghost Grandad: The Answers is a guided questionnaire to help you capture those things while you’re still very much here to answer them.
No email address. No sign-up. Just yours.
Print it. Write in it. Keep it. Pass it on.
If it makes you think of someone, send them a copy.
FREE FIVE-CHAPTER PREVIEW
Curious About Marcus?
If The Answers has made you wonder about the man who started all this, meet him properly.
Read the first five chapters of Ghost Grandad: Mostly Yes completely free.
By then Marcus has received news nobody wants, a spectacularly questionable idea is taking shape, and somebody else is considering a plan of their own.
Five chapters. Enough to decide whether you’d do the same – if you could.
ABOUT ME
I blame the gadgets
I’ve always been fascinated by technology — particularly the point where something clever stops being merely useful and starts changing how we live.
The idea for Ghost Grandad came from two things. The first was something I’d noticed – and I’ll admit to being slightly horrified by it – just how often children were being handed phones and tablets to keep them quiet. The second was reading about companies experimenting with “digital afterlives” – using someone’s old texts, messages and conversations to recreate the way they might respond after they’d died.
Put those two things together and it got me thinking: if technology could preserve enough of somebody’s voice, opinions, memories and judgement for them to keep answering questions after they’d gone… would that be wonderful, terrible — or both?
I come from a family of readers, writers and inveterate storytellers, and my working life has taken several fairly improbable turns. At 73, I wrote this – my first novel – aided and occasionally infuriated by an AI with which I spent an outrageous amount of time arguing. It seemed entirely appropriate for a novel about what happens when humans and technology become rather too involved in one another’s lives.
Ghost Grandad: Mostly Yes is the result.
Chrissy
SO WHAT NOW?
Ready to meet Marcus?
Start with five chapters completely free – or, if you’ve already made your mind up, go straight to the book.
Either way, don’t blame me if you end up wondering whether your family could cope with a digital version of you as well as the original.