An act of piety

Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from town A to town Z taking a census. The father, the narrator, knows he is dying. As a retired doctor he can interpret the fatal signs of his disease. His is a bizarre family; his wife, who has pre-deceased him, trained as a clown. Condemned to death and left with his disadvantaged son — ‘Our lives, my wife’s and mine, bent round him like a shield’ — he decides to register as a census-taker in an Orwell-ian state office. He asks questions of those interviewed, to which he sometimes but not always gets an answer

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

The novel becomes a parable, or rather a series of parables, complete with riddles. It explores the nature of the Down’s syndrome son and has its origins in the real-life relationship of Jesse Ball with his dead younger brother Abram, whose photographs appear at the end of the book.