The Wrong Son is a memoir of emotional precision - a searching, unsparing
account of what it means to come into being in the absence of love.
In 1963, a young husband loses his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old son
in a car accident. Six months later, he meets a woman who abandons her own
husband and child for him - a man who seems to her everything she has ever
wanted.
Within two years, a boy is born into this family of grief and guilt, into a house
already filled with ghosts, where neither parent can see him clearly through
what each has lost.
His mother demands perfection. His father, meanwhile, decides early on that
this child exists only because the first one died - and cannot forgive him for it.
Moulded by his mother, rejected by his father, he is given no space in which to
become himself.
Throughout his life, no matter how much he tries to invent himself, he is driven
by the fear that nothing real exists underneath. Fifty years on, after his parents'
deaths, that fear begins to unmoor him.
He turns to the work of psychoanalysts who were pioneers of early childhood
psychology around the time he was born.
Drawing on the insights of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan, The Wrong Son
traces a life shaped not only by loss and violence, but by psychic damage that
may never fully be shaken off.
With forensic clarity and unexpected humour, The Wrong Son is a quietly
devastating work: deeply human, psychologically attuned, and unafraid to stay
with what cannot be resolved.
About the Author :
Neil Griffiths is a novelist, publisher and founder of the literary prize, The
Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, now the Queen Mary
Small Press Fiction Prize. His first novel, Betrayal in Naples was winner of the
Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, Saving Caravaggio was short-listed for
the Costa Best Novel Award 2007, his last novel is the critically acclaimed As a
God Might Be.
Review :
“The page-turning quality of the best fiction with the astute self-awareness of the best memoir.”
Lily Dunn, Sins of My Father
“... a strangely propulsive, absorbing read.”
Sara Baume, Seven Steeples
“Simply put, I couldn’t leave it alone.”
Marina Benjamin, A Little Give
“An incredible achievement.”
Erin Vincent, Fourteen Ways of Looking
“This book is here to stay.”
Susanna Crossman, Home is Where We Start
“Nothing about this superb account feels unfair or forced. It is a case study of misdirected emotions, and the best thing Neil Griffiths has written.”
Will Eaves, Murmur
“Neil Griffiths has written an existential ghost story. In lean, eviscerating prose, he shows how the bludgeoning dramas of the past threaten to deform the chance at a real self.”
Sally Bayley, No Boys Play Here
“The Wrong Son is necessary, powerful and written with piercing accuracy.”
Alice Jolly, Dead Babies and Seaside Towns
“A brilliant anatomy of a deeply wounding childhood ...”
Rebecca Abrams, When Parents Die
