Reed’s Son of Destruction Published

Kit Reed, resident writer in the English Department, is the author of Son of Destruction, published by Severn House (U.K.) in October 2012. The U.S. version will be released in March 2013.

When his mother dies, Dan Carteret has only two leads to the identity of his father: a photograph of four young men, and a newspaper cutting showing the remains of a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Carteret travels to his mother’s hometown of Fort Jude and discovers that three cases of spontaneous combustion have occurred there in the recent past. In the search for his father, he confronts an affluent, insular society that closes ranks and refuses to give up the secret of what happened to Carteret’s mother at a fateful beach party in her youth. A fragmented narrative, using half a dozen different viewpoints, tells the story of the “thin line between an organised society and raw nature,” and presents a compelling account of people torn by clan loyalty and made desperate by love, hate and loneliness.

More information on the book is online here.The book is reviewed in The Financial Times.