A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

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Okay, we can see that Fran is someone who hates being backed into a corner where he might have to admit a failing. A dark, gripping psychological drama that is perfectly paced, 'A Station on a Path to Somewhere Better' is the third novel by the excellent Benjamin Wood. There's a good book in there somewhere but the whole thing needs pruning and paring back for it to emerge. Make no mistake, as a thriller and a tense murder mystery – we are informed from the outset that our protagonist will never see his mother again – A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is scarcely beatable, its plotting immaculate, and it will keep you on the edge of your seat throughout. In this powerful novel about father and son, the author probes this vital relationship, showing how our children hold us to account, how we misunderstand what they want from us and how hard we struggle to avoid their seeing us fail.

His third book A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (2018) was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature and the CWA Gold Dagger Award.A heartbreaking and heart-stopping new novel; a dark Northern noir that moves at breakneck speed but never fails to be tender and vulnerable as well as visceral and terrifying. He was so serene it chilled me, as though this was his resting state, his factory setting, to be unburdened of the people he was meant to care about, each slow-grown relationship, each held aspiration, each great and small responsibility that makes a life worth living. The last third is somewhat of a let down after all the tension that the author has achieved and the passages from the Artifex show are overdone, adding nothing at all.

Contrary to expectations, he appears on time and they go, sticking the first part of the book "The Sorceress" in the cassette player. Whether he does it because of deep-seated psychotic rage, a sense of entitlement, a combination of the two, or something else entirely isn’t ever made clear, and doesn’t really need to be.

Competently written with a descriptive use of language, the events that start to reveal themselves stir the imagination. A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is a deeply psychological story with creative twists that shock and captivate. He torments himself with this and on trying to apportion which parent is responsible for which personality trait. The book is a tremendous achievement, an unputdownable domestic thriller that is also subtle and moving . Slowly, the author reveals the relationship between the characters and unveils the father's erratic, unreliable and unpredictable personality.

Much of the novel is a road trip, with its climax set in the Lake District, highly appropriate backdrops. Whilst I appreciate that the story doesn’t end at the key event, but explores the aftermath and effect on our narrator’s life, the tone changed, morphing into a more prosaic and factual recount of many years. I imagined it would be about a twelve-year-old boys assent into manhood, where he learnt the facts of growing up when he took a trip in1995 with his estranged father.

because the writing was good, the lack of the other 3 because it was like trying to walk through treacle, a sad slightly pointless plot, unlikeable characters. His mother prepares him for disappointment, telling him that “ your father does whatever suits him…. That is a weighty moral issue, and had Wood spent longer in that place, narratively, it would have made more sense.