His third book, A STATION ON THE PATH TO SOMEWHERE BETTER (2018), was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. His gripping third book is about a father and son road trip — a week of aching unease that climaxes in horror. It's similar in theme to his others, but it possibly the best yet with its tightly crafted plotline and convincing characters. Morley’s Elmet was a surprise Booker nomination last year, and hopefully this might make next Tuesday’s longlist. A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better is spectacularly successful as a work of suspense, but it might be even better as an examination of trauma.

I really liked the way this was written, but could've done without the last 30-40 pages, the "aftermath," which answered every question, and in doing so diffused all that wonderful tension the previous 300 pages had built up. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. He excels at writing with the voice of a twelve year old boy, and the book is tense and chilling throughout, with just the right amount of foreshadowing. At the time, Daniel lived alone with his mother in a small village, Fran having been kicked out due to his lying and cheating.A chilling study of male violence, framed by a horribly, almost unbearably, moving portrait of a dysfunctional father-son dynamic, it left me in bits.

Wood effectively creates a manipulative, shitty ex-husband and self-centered absentee father in Francis Hardesty; the opening pages, where he arrives to collect Daniel for a road trip whose purpose is, for a while, unclear, cement his unreliability in our minds. But with every passing mile, the layers of Fran’s mendacity and desperation are exposed, pushing him to acts of violence that will define the rest of his son’s life. That line is one that Francis Hardesty tightrope-walks for the first half of the book, then falls off of spectacularly in the second half. He’s thrown himself into his studies, gone to LSE, ended up on Wall Street, loves a girl who understands him, marries her. I was completely transfixed by the tender and atmospheric writing that belies the violence bubbling beneath the surface.Since making the critics stand to attention with the narrative force of first The Bellwether Revivals then The Ecliptic , Benjamin Wood has been very much a novelist to watch. If Wood had let Daniel acknowledge the sheer banality of his father’s evil, it would have made for a stronger book. The journey starts out with high hopes but soon descends into a nightmare culminating in a series of terrible crimes. This story runs parallel to Daniel’s and he uses it as a way to emotionally support himself at times when he is alone, sad or terrified. Fran is an incurable womanising opportunist that has managed to destroy his marriage to Kath and consequently has been absent for most of Daniel’s life.

an impressive exercise in mood and narrative command, with a freezing chill that takes some time to depart from the mind. The destination for their trip is Leeds, in particular the Yorkshire Television studios where the children’s TV series, The Artifex is being filmed. Narrated by Daniel Jarrett (formally Hardesty) it tells the story of a twelve year old Daniel and a road trip he took with his father, Francis in 1995. Benjamin Wood is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King's College London, where he teaches fiction modules and founded the PhD in Creative Writing program. Daniel is obsessed with the TV series, and it is only because of her son’s fixation with anything Artifex, that his mother, Kath, allows Fran to take Daniel on this trip to see the film-set and meet the actors.As the narrative progresses the veil is lifted on a totally unreliable and erratic person, prone to mood swings and broken promises. 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. 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. W]ith his third novel, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, Wood’s talent has burgeoned spectacularly. One August morning in 1995, the young Daniel and his estranged father Francis – a character of ‘two weathers’, of irresistible charm and roiling self-pity – set out on a road trip to the North that seems to represent a chance to salvage their relationship.