Kadian Journal

This is the very best account of a parent’s bereavement I have ever read, a powerfully immediate and clear-eyed record of a devastating experience. It is also a love story, true and deep – offering film-like clips of the joys of parenthood, and of the agony when it abruptly ends.

Julia Samuel, Founder and Patron of Child Bereavement UK

Stunning. The most moving book I've read.

Ian Austin MP

Harding's remarkable memoir is written with transparent emotional intelligence. It makes one understand how it was for a father to lose a boy unique in his eyes and loved by everyone who knew him: Kadian.

Kate Kellaway, Observer

This book is raw and heart-breaking but it is never intrusive or gratuitous. The writing is real and spare, the love so very deep that the reader can scarcely look away … A beautiful tribute.

Sunday Express

A memoir, a threnody and a love song

The Times

Heart-breaking … For a man in such raw, intense pain, Harding writes with incredible precision … Kadian Harding’s 14 years shine brilliantly from its pages … Thomas Harding has been generous in sharing his boy with me and I am grateful he found words.

Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

Out of unbearable grief comes a book of profound love: there is no shred of self-pity in this marvellous book. The malicious and random brutality of fate and the racking pain of loss have met their match in Thomas Harding who miraculously turns those horrors into something memorably great.

Stephen Fry

A wonderful book, unflinching in its portrayal of the agony - and fury - of grief but at the same time filled with the incandescent love and joy felt by a father for his son, his beautiful boy. Rarely has that intimacy been so lyrically and beautifully described.

Sally Brampton

A raw and compelling read, weaving between the accident, its aftermath, precious moments in Kadian's life and the unique relationship between a father and son.

Angela Levin, Daily Telegraph

Heartbreaking … profoundly moving … a tender tribute.

Daily Mail