His father, Francis, estranged from his mother, is a set builder for the show in Leeds, and promises Daniel a studio visit. The build up in the first half of the book had me slightly on edge reading,just waiting for the bad thing to happen. This is a story charged with unpleasant energy, and I’m not sure you could get a trigger warning big enough to cover everything that happens in A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (a horribly ironic title, especially once you know in what context that phrase is used). The journey starts out with high hopes but soon descends into a nightmare culminating in a series of terrible crimes.

As the novel ends, the implication is that the real achievement is to learn how to live with inevitable failure – as father, as husband, as man – and have the strength of character to try again, to fail again, to fail better. If you don’t think you’ll read it but you want my opinions on it anyway, for some reason, or if you don’t mind knowing some details of the promised violence before opening the book, read on. How he went on a road trip with his father, Francis, a journey that had a really rather shocking end and one that has haunted him into his present.

More of this parallel wouldn’t have gone amiss: the point is that the show is about not just the line between reality and fantasy, but that between fantasy and insanity.

I found it disappointing, unsuitable for the character, a little too neat, perhaps a little implausible. The richly textured narrative is subtle and holds quiet power which entrances, draws you in and before you know it you are in its grip. It is all the little touches of mundanity within the drama of the narrative that keep it believable. Still, when I think about that August week and what transpired, I know it is the fault line under every step forward I try to make.A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is his best work yet – a novel written from the gut, and with a correspondingly visceral power. For twenty years, Daniel Hardesty has borne the emotional scars of a chi ldhood trauma which he is powerless to undo, which leaves him no peace. Elegant and disturbing … accomplished beautifully … highly suspenseful … a novel of expertly woven tension and frightening glimpses into the mind of the deranged other; a worthy successor to Wood’s excellent second novel, The Ecliptic . If I have a major issue with A Station On the Path, it’s that it seems to be reaching for a moral weight with which to invest its horrors that doesn’t appear warranted.

The gaps in knowledge and understanding allow the reader to fill in the blanks and the horror feels almost unimginable. This is a psychological character study, a story of a boy—now a man—who went on a journey with his father, estranged from the family, with the hope that he will prove his constancy, and instead, finds himself in a situation that few sane people could hope to endure. In this powerful novel about father and son, the author probes this vital relationship, showing how our children hold us to account, how we misunderstand what they want from us and how hard we struggle to avoid their seeing us fail. We know that something bad is coming, we don’t know what and we don’t know how, we just have to strap in and follow along.Towards the end, all grown up and contemplating fatherhood, Daniel unearths a motto from Sophocles passed on from his mother: “The small man lives his life outside disaster. Hindsight makes it easy to link every problem in their marriage to my father, bur perhaps this is too simplistic a view to take -- because, despite what happened in the end, and all his cruelty, can it really be that he was responsible for each defective moment in their life together? His debut The Bellwether Revivals (2012) was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won France's Prix du Roman Fnac. I found myself checking the % marker on the Kindle with every page in the hope that I was nearing the end. Several more of these ominous sentences are scattered through the book; it’s not the gravest of authorial sins, but it’s never been a strategy I particularly like.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

But with every passing mile, the layers of Fran's mendacity and desperation are exposed, pushing him to acts of violence that will define the rest of his son's life.