I was lucky enough to bag a preview copy of this startling piece of non-fiction a few months ahead of its official release in April. 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”. On the evening of Halloween in 2015, Morgan Hehir was walking with friends close to Nuneaton town centre when they were viciously attacked by a group of strangers. The murder of Morgan Hehir in 2015 in Nuneaton, a market town in the Warwickshire, shook the local community – the sheer brutality of the attacks, and also that fact something so horrible could happen so close to home. 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 local journalist sent that manuscript to Whitehouse, a novelist, winner of the 2012 Betty Trask award for his first book, Bed.The unspooling detail of the next few days and months as the family, like hundreds of families up and down the country, tried to understand the unfathomable pointlessness of the violence of that night, brings their love for Morgan to vivid life.

On the court steps, however, there were no media to greet him, no one at all to deliver his statement to.On Halloween night in 2015, Morgan Hehir was out with friends in his home town of Nuneaton when they were attacked by a group of strangers. Yet by framing it in this way, Whitehouse engages the reader, too – imagine what it might be like, he asserts, to lose a son in this way. I never met Morgan but I wanted About a Son to reflect him in the way that another kind of book wouldn’t. 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. But the lanterns crash to the ground and set fire to the grass, and suddenly everyone starts laughing because they know Morgan would have found it funny too.

I am the author of three novels: ‘Bed’ (Canongate 2011 - winner of the Betty Trask Prize and currently being made into a film from a script by Jack Thorne), ‘Mobile Library’ (Picador 2015 - winner of the Jerwood Fiction Prize) and ‘The Long Forgotten’ (Picador 2018). Morgan’s dad, Colin Hehir, began to keep a diary soon after his son’s death – one that chronicled his grief, how Morgan’s death affected his family, and then his fight to get the justice he felt his son hadn’t received, refusing to let Morgan become another statistic, another anonymous victim to knife crime. You absolutely must not miss this extraordinarily compelling work of creative non-fiction that is both deeply respectful and superbly crafted. The message becomes clear: stories can save us, unite us, show us other ways of being, offer solace . When Colin Hehir, Morgan’s father, emerged from Warwick crown court the following year, having seen his son’s three killers convicted, he’d prepared a statement for the press, imagining a scrum of flashbulbs and TV cameras.

He was twenty years old and loved making music with his band, going to the football with his mates, having a laugh; a talented graffiti artist who dreamed of moving away and building a life for himself by the sea. Morgan was kicked and punched to the ground and stabbed several times by one of the men with a steak knife. The diary eventually made it into the hands of David Whitehouse, an author originally from Nuneaton, and what emerged from this unique collaboration is a feat of creative non-fiction. And unlike what people imagine from watching TV dramas, there was nobody waiting to hear their story: no microphones, no satellite van, nothing. It is tender and beautiful, and it is an angry book, a book whose anger is balanced and honed, anger as a tool, slicing through systemic indifference and obfuscation to what is true and right.

Three months later, Colin got in touch with Whitehouse directly to ask what he thought of the 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. The book is written through Colin’s eyes, in the second person present tense, as if the terrible events it describes are happening in real time to someone else. 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. The whole book turns on the moment where Colin and his family leave the trial, not feeling that justice has been properly served.