The Wrong Child

Reviews of the most thought-provoking thriller of the year, for fans of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Shriver, BIG LITTLE LIES by Liane Moriarty and MY ABSOLUTE DARLING by Gabriel Tallent: 'Brilliant, but as dark as hell. The British version of Daniel Woodrell' * METRO * A very thought-provoking read * THE SUN * God, this is dark. A study of guilt and grief * DAILY MAIL * A deeply unsettling tale of loss, abandonment and revenge * THE LIST * [Gornell's] admirable single-mindedness and cool nerve are allied to a highly developed prose style which effectively conjures up a mood of darkness, intense cold and moral ambiguity - one in which nature itself feels complicit in the actions of the people. It is genuinely gripping * THE HERALD * The Wrong Child is a startling and uncompromising story of grief and anger, of abandonment and decay. It's intense - darker than dark - but also original and beautiful * HELEN FITZGERALD, author of Viral, Dead Lovely and The Cry * [An] uncompromising story of grief, anger, abandonment and decay * SCOTS MAGAZINE * Stunning. Macabre, unsettling and beautifully poetic * BRIAN CONAGHAN, Costa Award winning author of THE BOMBS THAT BROUGHT US TOGETHER *

Barry Gornell was born in Liverpool and now lives on the West Coast of Scotland. He is a novelist/screenwriter, ex fire-fighter, truck driver and bookshop manager. His short films Sonny's Pride and The Race were broadcast on STV. Graduating from the University of Glasgow Creative Writing Masters programme in 2008, he was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Bursary in 2009. His short fiction has been published in The Herald newspaper, Let's Pretend, 37 stories about (in)fidelity, Gutter 03 and Gutter 04. The Healing of Luther Grove was his first novel followed by The Wrong Child, which was originally published by Scottish press Freight Books in 2016.