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.

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.