THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE AUGUST PRIZE 2023 'Bloody awful? Bloody brilliant
more like' Daily Telegraph I'm fizzing. I love not being his son. Yes. I can feel it in my
whole body. A great thrill - as if an adventure has begun. As if I'm the boy in a book about a
boy who finds out his dad is the king of a magical and distant land. Christmas 1983. In the
aftermath of yet another furious argument seven-year-old Andrev's mother lets him in on a
secret: his father is in fact not his father. And so begins a new kind of childhood in which
fathers come and go arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet. Fathers can
be magicians or murderers artists or thieves and like growing pains or the weather they
appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a
flame - but even she can't control how they behave. Vivid and joyful raw and tender Bloody
Awful in Different Ways is a novel about growing up in the chaos of social change about how
love begins and ends and above all about men. Because after all you learn an awful lot about
this strange species when you have seven fathers in seven years. 'Pure joyous storytelling on
every page ... A little treasure of a book' Fredrick Backman 'A delight from start to finish'
Jennie Godfrey 'Flawless ... So sharp so beguiling so acutely observed' Guardian
