The farm – Tom Rob Smith

Philip Larkin, a famous English poet, once wrote: “They **** you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you” In The Farm, by Tom Rob Smith, Daniel is caught between his two parents and forced to face up to his family’s dark past.

One day, Daniel gets a call from his father: his mother is ill. Her terrible imaginings have led to her being committed to a psychiatric hospital. The idyllic retirement in rural Sweden that he’d imagined his parents were enjoying is clearly not the whole picture.

As he’s about to get on a plane, he gets a call from his mother: “Everything that man has told you is a lie. I’m not mad…I need the police…Meet me at Heathrow. If you refuse to believe me, I will no longer consider you my son.”

How can Daniel possibly reconcile these two conflicting messages? One parent is clearly lying, but which one? And why? Presented with a horrific crime, a conspiracy that implicates his own father, Daniel must follow a trail full of twists and turns if he’s going to decide for himself.

Anyone who has read the Child 44 trilogy will need no introduction to Tom Rob Smith.  Books in the series won a number of awards including the International Thriller Writer Award for Best First Novel and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. His work has also widely recognised outside the crime thriller community, being longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. A major film adaptation of Child 44, starring Noomi Rapace and Gary Oldman, is due for release in September 2014.