Dead is one thing. Gone is another. He’s just moved to the cloud.
Almost every child in the Western world is growing up with a screen in front of them. Marcus Whitfield decides to leave his granddaughter Mila something better.
Sophia has ten million followers and almost no attention left for Mila. Sophia's father, Marcus, can see what is happening—and he doesn't much like it.
With only months left to live, Marcus creates one last extraordinary invention: a whisper-thin wearable film that will let five-year-old Mila carry on talking to him after he's gone. Not a recording. Not a comforting handwritten letter. Something far more clever.
So Marcus hasn't exactly gone. It's more of a change of address. And what he has created can learn, adapt and, increasingly, make decisions of its own.
When Sophia's almost-bankrupt boyfriend becomes desperate for money, he comes up with a spectacularly ill-conceived plan: have Mila kidnapped.
Neither he nor his co-conspirator has the faintest idea what they're up against.
Is it Marcus? Yes and no. But mostly yes.
Dark, sharp and funny, Ghost Grandad is a novel about love, attention, technology—and how we are raising our children.
