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. 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.

Whitehouse's writing is energetic and pacey, spiked with startling moments of tenderness and superbly controlled. 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.

Told with such skill, almost like a letter to the grieving father, a gift that honours the details of the crime and its aftermath, while transforming them into art. Whitehouse rewrote the first entry in the diary, and sent it to Colin, who gave him permission to continue. 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. This is the first book I've read in a long time that acknowledges the grief, rage and misery of a crime's aftermath, and it does so with such truthfulness, humanity and respect.

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. Weird thing to say, but the author might have invented a new genre of literature here, so unique are the events leading up to the book's publication.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. 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. 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. A mix of true crime and memoir, it's a book that pays tribute to Morgan as a young man whose life was suddenly cut short, while also being a book about Nuneaton itself, capturing the grit and tragedy beneath the surface of the town, as well as a sense of community and openness.