Whitehouse's world is just off-centre of the real one, skewed with a dusting of magic realism and underpinned by fairy tales . . . This is a thoughtful, kind-hearted and original book ( Emerald Street) Engagingly offbeat . . . the van becomes as much of a vehicle of fantasy as the Little Prince's biplane or James's giant peach - both a sanctuary from the outside world and a store of limitless possibilities . . . quietly profound . . . genuinely compelling ( Guardian) 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.

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. 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. 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.” Book lovers will be charmed by Mobile Library. . . It's a funny coming-of-age tale ( Good Housekeeping) 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.”

Last on

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)

This, Whitehouse makes clear, was no extraordinary event. It happened to them; it could happen to you. Whitehouse writes in a spare style reminiscent of Gordon Burn, with a pathological attention to the vacancy of murder and griefAnd 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. 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 year-long Books Unbanned program offers 13 to 21-year-olds a digital library card and access to over 100 databases. Last week in Georgia, a new bill was passed to give more power to school boards and parents in what books are available in schools. Elizabeth is joined by the bestselling crime writer Karin Slaughter who lives in Atlanta Georgia, and Linda Johnson, President of the Brooklyn Library, to discuss their concerns. 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) 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) 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.”

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. 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)Whitehouse’s idea was to try and tell Morgan’s story by putting the reader in his father’s shoes. “It sounds a bit lofty but I also wanted to somehow translate the pain and loss from his personal experience into a universal one; to tell Colin’s story, but also the story of his family and the town, which I think is so important in understanding what happened to Morgan.” Whitehouse rewrote the first entry in the diary, and sent it to Colin, who gave him permission to continue. Over the following months, the two texted and spoke regularly on the phone, and from these conversations Whitehouse was able to add further colour to the story. A story in three parts 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.” 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)

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.

You might baulk at reading such a dark story. But despite its grim subject matter, there are moments of sunny levity. A week after Morgan’s murder, the family decide to light and launch some Chinese lanterns from their garden in his memory. 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. Divided into three parts—"Loss", "Justice" and "Truth"— About a Son is exceptional, and not just because its beating heart derives from the vivid testament of a man who had “never written anything longer than a shopping list”. It is also outstanding for the way in which Whitehouse, as a professional writer, has used his craft—including an instinctive and brilliant use of the second-person voice—to write something seamless, where it is impossible to tell where Colin’s voice ends and Whitehouse’s begins. A more conventional approach might have been to ghost or co-write the book as a first-person memoir by Colin. I ask Whitehouse if this was ever on the cards. “There is a version of this book that is exactly that. But we always wanted to make it something other than a straightforward, conventional telling of the story. I never met Morgan but I wanted About a Son to reflect him in the way that another kind of book wouldn’t.” 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