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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. 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. In the aftermath of his funny, talented son’s murder, Morgan’s father Colin began to keep an extraordinary diary. 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. 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.
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. But we always wanted to make it something other than a straightforward, conventional telling of the story. Whitehouse's writing is energetic and pacey, spiked with startling moments of tenderness and superbly controlled. Whitehouse’s writing is brilliant and devastating, having taken Colin’s diaries in their most raw, vulnerable form and turned them into a compassionate portrayal of a family’s grief and trauma, and a furious indictment of the institutions that failed Morgan and so many other young people like him. 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.
It became a record of his family’s grief, the ensuing trial, and his determined quest to uncover the shocking truth that the police had kept hidden.
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. Whitehouse is a masterful storyteller who builds an intimate, immersive and unflinching portrait of a boy lost to preventable violence and the family who loved him. It is an unflinching examination of grief, a painstaking deconstruction of injustice and a dispatch from the frontiers of the human heart. In doing so, he has ensured that Colin Hehir's beloved son, Morgan, and the family's fight for justice will never be forgotten.
Morgan was kicked and punched to the ground and stabbed several times by one of the men with a steak knife. 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. Mobile Libraryis an excellent novel about the power of words and how stories can help us transcend loss, loneliness and being an outsider. On the evening of 31 October 2015, 20-year-old Morgan Hehir was stabbed to death in a park in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.
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. 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 .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. About A Son is a story of grief and the urgent all consuming need for closure when truth and justice are denied. 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. These details are important, not just because they paint an intimate portrait of the Hehirs, but because Colin and Morgan are everyman figures.
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.
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. And yet if ever a book brought home the stark human reality behind the words “true” and “crime”, it is this one.
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