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

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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. Both forensic and compassionate, it asks how do we come to terms with the tragic loss of a beloved son, failed by the system and taken far too early. And 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. About A Son is a story of grief and the urgent all consuming need for closure when truth and justice are denied.

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. 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. Heartwarming and heartbreaking, sometimes in the space of one page, it's a wise and wondrous reminder just how far a library card can take you .Whitehouse's writing is energetic and pacey, spiked with startling moments of tenderness and superbly controlled. 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.

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. 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.The story of Bobby Nusku and all of the people drawn into his journey over the course of English woodland and a crumbling aristocratic pile in Scotland is so compelling and tenderly drawn. Elizabeth talks to David Whitehouse about that process and the profound impact Morgan's story has had on his life. 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.

A riveting blend of reportage, memoir and true crime, and the first non-fiction book from Francesca Main’s new Phoenix imprint at Orion, it is one of those titles that excels by defying categorisation. A week after Morgan’s murder, the family decide to light and launch some Chinese lanterns from their garden in his memory. 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. 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. And those who do watch will look at your face and see the desire to find out exactly what happened to Morgan that night burning so fiercely it’s hard to look at for long.

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.

But we always wanted to make it something other than a straightforward, conventional telling of the story. And unlike what people imagine from watching TV dramas, there was nobody waiting to hear their story: no microphones, no satellite van, nothing. David Whitehouse has taken a father's 'unique record of grief' and turned it into a poetic indictment of policing in austerity Britain. His murderer, Dec-lan Gray, had been released from jail just four months earlier, having served time for manslaughter. He is tormented by powerlessness, not least in a long, fruitless campaign against Apple, which cruelly refuse to help the family – or the police – unlock Morgan’s MacBook to access his music and his photos, because it breaches its terms and conditions.He will forgive most clumsy attempts at condolence, but he will never forgive “anyone who thinks, even for a second, that Morgan must have had it coming”.