This, Whitehouse makes clear, was no extraordinary event. It happened to them; it could happen to you. It may provide the Hehirs with some comfort. I hope that this exceptional book will, too – because as much as it is about his death, it is also a tribute to who Morgan Hehir was, and the memory of his life will live long inside anyone who reads it. This empathy lets us understand all too keenly their hellish experience. “Today you bury your child,” writes Whitehouse of Friday 11 December 2015. “Were a parent to name their greatest fear, it would surely be this. But it’s bigger than fear. Fear suggests something to be conquered, a mountain in your mind. But there is no terrain to burying a child. Nothing to grip hold of, nothing to find foothold in. It can’t be overcome because it doesn’t have a summit.”

I was utterly floored by the emotional depth of About A Son– a book that reaches so deeply into the human experience that to read it is to be forever changed. It is an unflinching examination of grief, a painstaking deconstruction of injustice and a dispatch from the frontiers of the human heart’ Elizabeth Day Mobile Libraryis an excellent novel about the power of words and how stories can help us transcend loss, loneliness and being an outsider. Whitehouse's ability to mix laughs with pathos makes for a warm-hearted book about family and a love letter to the importance of libraries (Nikesh Shukla, author of COCONUT UNLIMITED) Gray was eventually given a life sentence with a minimum 23-year term for Morgan’s murder; the other two had six- and eight-year sentences for manslaughter and were released in nearly half that time. The Hehir family’s battle to prove that the police and probation services had been disastrously negligent in allowing Gray to be at liberty to kill for a second time meanwhile – a dispiriting, predictable process in which “every department of the institutions designed to protect you will lay claim to changing or having changed, to learning or promising to learn, to having been wrong but not being wrong again” – lasted longer than the latter two jail terms. Book lovers will be charmed by Mobile Library. . . It's a funny coming-of-age tale ( Good Housekeeping) The quirkiest plot we've seen for a while . . . making for a magical literary tour that evokes how the books we read as children inspire us. Heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure ( Glamour)Thanks to Colin’s bravery, we don’t have to imagine. Of those who try to help the family, Whitehouse writes, “They want you to be you again. Happy, smiling Colin Hehir. Would do anything for anyone Colin Hehir. Always up for a laugh Colin Hehir. But the truth is, that’s what’s been taken from you, not just a son. You no longer exist.”

The fact that Whitehouse is himself from Nuneaton adds to the book’s startling veracity. While writing it, Whitehouse returned to the town to spend time with Colin Hehir and his family. “We stood on the spot where Morgan was murdered; we walked his last steps; we went to his grave. It was an immediately powerful experience to stand with Morgan’s dad on the very spot where he collapsed, and it was all the more potent because even though I left the town a long time ago, I knew that exact place.” In the book’s first section, we learn not just of hospital worker Morgan’s death and its effect on his family, but also about his character – that of a young man who was the life and soul, a mirror image in some ways of his HGV-driving father. These details are important, not just because they paint an intimate portrait of the Hehirs, but because Colin and Morgan are everyman figures. MOBILE LIBRARY was published by Picador in the UK in January 2015. It won the Jerwood Fiction Prize that same year. Whitehouse’s writing is brilliant and devastating, having taken Colin’s diaries in their most raw, vulnerable form and turned them into a compassionate portrayal of a family’s grief and trauma, and a furious indictment of the institutions that failed Morgan and so many other young people like him. A difficult but necessary read.Most weeks, I’m in the habit of looking at a trial list that details the cases at the central criminal court. It’s called “What’s on at the Old Bailey”, as if it’s a section in a listings magazine. For a while, some years ago, nearly all the trials were terror-related, foiled Islamist bomb plots or hate crimes. Recently, however, as in all criminal courts across the land, the listings have returned to their single depressing theme: young men stabbing and killing other young men on Britain’s streets. From the moment he heard the news, Morgan’s father Colin Hehir began to keep an extraordinary diary. It became a record not only of the immediate aftermath of his son’s murder, but also a chronicle of his family’s evolving grief, the trial of Morgan’s killers, and his personal fight to unravel the lies, mistakes and cover-ups that led to a young man with a history of violence being free to take Morgan’s life that night. Colin, his wife, Sue, and their two other sons were called to the University hospital in Coventry where their new, terrible life of seeking justice for their murdered son began. Waiting rooms became a big part of it. And tea and unanswered questions and almost incomprehensible bureaucracy. In the first of these rooms, they were told by a police officer that they were not allowed to go to see their son, who had just died in the adjacent trauma theatre, because “he is a crime scene now”. If they tried to insist, the officer told them: “I will have to arrest you.” Powerful, eccentric . . . Whitehouse's writing is energetic and pacey, spiked with startling moments of tenderness and superbly controlled. Don't wait for the inevitable film ( The Times) I ask Whitehouse what his hopes are for the book once it is published. “The sole objective is for people to know Morgan’s story. The whole book turns on the moment where Colin and his family leave the trial, not feeling that justice has been properly served. And unlike what people imagine from watching TV dramas, there was nobody waiting to hear their story: no microphones, no satellite van, nothing. Every day, these things happen to ordinary, normal people but their stories are rarely told.” Morgan’s story, now optioned for television by Tannadice Pictures, is both emblematic of the tragedy of rising knife crime and an indictment of underfunded police forces and underresourced institutions operating in times of austerity. “That’s what these things looks like. They look like Morgan,” says Whitehouse.

Full of heart and hope and absurd bravery, as three lost souls and Bert the dog run away from home in a stolen mobile library. They then set about creating their own kind of family and rewriting the stories of their lives . . . the writer's charismatic, sparky tale of salvation and the stories within stories brilliantly shows how adventure can overtake and transform the most unlikely of people ( Sunday Express) And we have our monthly recommendation from inside the book industry with Jacques Testard from Fitzcaraldo Editions,, who chooses Fleur Jaeggy’s The Water Statues translated by Gini Alhadeff from New Directions Publishing.Inspired by this diary, About A Son is a groundbreaking work of creative non-fiction that asks vital questions about the nature of justice and pays tribute to the unbreakable bond between a father and son. A modern day fairytale . . . a plot that bounds along, dramatic event after dramatic event . . . It's also fun . . . The message becomes clear: stories can save us, unite us, show us other ways of being, offer solace . . . as messages go, it's a sound one, an example of the open-hearted warmth at the core of this book ( Financial Times) Whitehouse writes in a spare style reminiscent of Gordon Burn, with a pathological attention to the vacancy of murder and grief And all the while he and Sue are drip-fed information about his son’s killers: two brothers, Declan and Karlton Gray and an older acquaintance, Simon Rowbotham, who was once featured in a Channel 5 documentary, Benefit Life: Jailbird Boys Going Straight. They are derailed in this process by the discovery that Declan Gray, 21, who subsequently admitted the stabbing, had six years earlier beaten and killed another man, Adrian Howard, 38, after Howard refused to give him a cigarette. And then that Gray, having been released on licence from a young offender’s centre after four and a half years for that crime, had subsequently been arrested three times over allegations of serious violence but somehow never returned to jail for violating the conditions of his licence.