A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

Product Information

Wood’s outstanding talent takes a different turn on this (almost) unbearably gripping, disturbing and heartrending road trip. Okay, we can see that Fran is someone who hates being backed into a corner where he might have to admit a failing.

The beginning of “A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better”, by Benjamin Wood, starts with dire foreshadowing and then whams you with a punch that absolutely requires that you keep reading this gripping psychological suspense novel. Tony and Susan: путешествие с папой, которое так неплохо начиналось и сулило двенадцатилетнему герою множество радостных событий, превращается в золотую жилу для психотерапевтов. A novel of expertly woven tension and frightening glimpses into the mind of the deranged other’ … Benjamin Wood. This book had a gripping first half; the build up to the major incident was packed with suspense and tight writing, and although slow moving, this rammed up the intensity and urged me to read on. As his story unfolds, you don't really find the suspense that is promised on the cover, but more of a sadness for him.

No one is going to survive this story, and for a while I was sure Dan would be one of those who would perish at his father’s hands. His debut The Bellwether Revivals (2012) was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won France's Prix du Roman Fnac. 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. Travelling well beyond his earlier fiction, Wood has produced a tour de force that marks his creative arrival.

His first novel The Bellwether Revivals was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won one of France's foremost literary awards, Le Prix du Roman Fnac. Having achieved this transmogrification, Fran is now utterly free – and, to the reader’s horror, his emergence, like that of a fully formed butterfly from its chrysalis, does seem to be a kind of achievement, the fulfilment of some dark potential that has been building for decades. If you don’t think you’ll read it but you want my opinions on it anyway, for some reason, or if you don’t mind knowing some details of the promised violence before opening the book, read on. The significance of the children's serial is lost on me, although it is clear that Dan identifies himself with the young boy in the story. Daniel is a huge fan and this trip is not only a long overdue chance to spend time with his father but it’s also an opportunity to visit the set and meet the stars of his favourite TV programme as Francis works on the show and has promised him a guided tour.Benjamin Wood follows up the stunning The Ecliptic with a meditation on fathers and sons, and the lasting effects of horrific acts of violence … I loved Wood’s second novel, and this is a completely different but equally stunning piece of work. 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.

The book is told from the point of view of twelve year old Daniel, who is on a road trip with his father, travelling north to visit a film set his father works at. Tenderly dissecting the limits of love between parent and child while wriggling with a rich, thrilling tension, this palpably atmospheric story found its way beneath my skin and now lives there. The plot of The Artifex parallels Daniel’s journey, a device that might seem trite in less skilled hands, but here the elements are balanced perfectly. What can possibly go wrong when you dad shows up promising to take you on a trip to the set of the TV series he's working on?I enjoyed the first person narrative,looking back and admitting this may not be as things we're,but this is how I remember them. The back cover of my proof of this doesn’t give much away: merely the names and relationship of our two protagonists, Francis and Daniel Hardesty, father and son, and the promise of a road trip that ends in an explosion of violence, which continues to haunt Daniel twenty years after the fact.

It was at the end of the chapter, where Wood takes a huge risk in the writing and breaks a well-known rule…never tell the reader what is going to happen at the start of the story… I read the words that end chapter one; As we drove off, [Mum] was smiling at herself, a limp hand spread across her heart. A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is a deeply psychological story with creative twists that shock and captivate. What begins as the much anticipated trip for Dan, aged 12, with his father becomes an increasingly horrific journey and what makes it so compelling is the clarity and conviction with which Dan's growing disillusionment and eventual betrayal are portrayed. If I have a major issue with A Station On the Path, it’s that it seems to be reaching for a moral weight with which to invest its horrors that doesn’t appear warranted. Their one shared interest is a children’s TV program—The Artifex—which, no coincidence, centers around a child who has greater insights and innate powers than others of his age.He drugs his nights up with sleeping tablets, he’s cold with other people and too wedded to his job. In the latter stages of the novel, Daniel is an adult, obsessively trying to reconstruct those dramatic events from memory, witness statements, and video evidence. 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.