Okay, Fran Hardesty was clearly a liar, and a cheapskate; he’d cancelled the nice hotel Daniel’s Mum had made him promise to book, and now Dan’s sleeping above a pub, while his dad has sex with a singer in the ensuite. I rarely come back to books once I’ve decided against them, but occasionally my instincts tell me to give something another chance. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Danny's father is a complex character, not just a pantomime villain, and the way things play out seems realistic. Morley’s Elmet was a surprise Booker nomination last year, and hopefully this might make next Tuesday’s longlist.

They fly by the seat of their pants until they crash, squandering such native intelligence as they possess on the pursuit of instant gratification and endless self-aggrandisement. Awkward conversation and digs about Daniel’s mother and their relationship, hints at an unhappy marriage with infidelity, drunkeness and violence mar every conversation and thought.What Sophocles actually says is: “When a god drives a man, and deceives him, he will decide that what is bad is good and live only a brief while outside disaster. As his story unfolds, you don't really find the suspense that is promised on the cover, but more of a sadness for him. It unfolds with all the gravity of a factual story; so many of the details somehow have the sickening ring of truth about them. This is a story charged with unpleasant energy, and I’m not sure you could get a trigger warning big enough to cover everything that happens in A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (a horribly ironic title, especially once you know in what context that phrase is used). Which might well be a recipe for something his mother might have approved of, but it has no basis in Greek drama.

For the first hundred or so pages, I was convinced that this would be a highly rated book for me, but the lacklustre second half ultimately held it back. Francis is also a liar, and Daniel, now narrating as an adult and who hoards VHS tapes of the show, warns the reader that the trip went badly (“when I think about that August week and what transpired, I know it is the fault line under every forward step I try to make”), but it takes a while for the reader to find out just how disastrous. This is a well-written tale, which is full of foreboding, as you know from the beginning that something terrible is going to happen, and yet you can't help hope, like Daniel, that it will be averted. Most of all though, Wood’s skill is the subtlety and compassion in his writing and the gradual reveal; for much of the first half the reader is lured along, intrigued by what might happen next.There’s a final section where we see Daniel as an adult, with a beloved partner, and realise that the book has been driving, all along, towards the question of whether he can bear to be a father, whether it is irresponsible for him to taint a child with the bloodline of a mass murderer. Every phase of Fran’s moral slippage, from the false bonhomie and the phony assurances to the alarming upsurge of mania and muddle, is disquietingly registered. I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. Elegant and disturbing … accomplished beautifully … highly suspenseful … a novel of expertly woven tension and frightening glimpses into the mind of the deranged other; a worthy successor to Wood’s excellent second novel, The Ecliptic . That child almost succumbs to an asthma attack until he is lifted into the air by a strange and exotic being from another world.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.I have a ridiculous amount of books sat on my bookshelves just patiently waiting to be read and I thought that this may be the perfect opportunity to finally delve into them.