About A Son: A Murder and A Father’s Search for Truth

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It brings the victim to the fore in a way that the courts struggle to do, and it shows what can go wrong when the victim is forgotten or sidelined. A local journalist sent that manuscript to Whitehouse, a novelist, winner of the 2012 Betty Trask award for his first book, Bed.

And unlike what people imagine from watching TV dramas, there was nobody waiting to hear their story: no microphones, no satellite van, nothing.A few metres behind you is a big fence behind which the knife used to kill Morgan was found, but inexplicably, and as you’ll learn in court, not until days later.

In response to the increasing amount of book bans in schools and libraries across the United States, Brooklyn Public Library announced they’ll be giving free access to more than half a million e- and audiobooks for young adults from around the country. The facts tell nothing of the staggering emotional heft held within its 272 pages, as this singular blend of memoir, reportage and true crime investigation enmesh the reader in a tale of profound love, towering grief and intense indignation at a justice system that let down the Hehirs . These are the facts that sit at the heart of David Whitehouse’s astonishing new work of creative non-fiction, worked up out of diaries kept after Morgan’s death by his father, Colin, and subsequent conversations with the author. Whitehouse had grown up in Nuneaton, he knew the people and the places that Morgan had known, and having read the diary worked with the family, particularly with Colin, to produce this book, part memoir, part true crime story. The book that everyone will be talking about this year: a staggering work of honesty, empathy and humanity, wholly unlike anything else you will have read.The year-long Books Unbanned program offers 13 to 21-year-olds a digital library card and access to over 100 databases. 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. Colin attends a football match at Nuneaton Borough where a huge banner with his son’s face is held up; he takes to riding his son’s bike, fast, downhill; he goes round the town photographing Morgan’s graffiti tag; he hugs the woman who stops putting the local freesheet through his door for fear of adding to his horror. On the court steps, however, there were no media to greet him, no one at all to deliver his statement to. In doing so, he has ensured that Colin Hehir's beloved son, Morgan, and the family's fight for justice will never be forgotten.