Smothered

<p><em>When Alan's mother rings to beg him to return to the family home for the final weeks of his father's life he baulks unwilling to be around the man who tried to control every moment of his childhood and adolescence. But he is at the sick man's bedside when his father makes an extraordinary request. Alan is tempted but does he follow through?</em></p><p><br></p><p><strong>Smothered </strong>is the coming of age story of a socially isolated young man told with unsparing skill and sympathetic insight.</p><p><br></p><p>Alan grows up in a baffling world of stifling normality. His father Tosh is an ambitious man of more energy than talent; his mother is a caring woman who accepts the necessity of being seen to respect a conventional life. As he struggles to find purpose and worth Alan is drawn through a tangle of drugs self-harm and self-serving friendships always unable to free himself from the quagmire of family life and expectation. His final confrontation with his father and his past is both terrifying and consoling.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Smothered </strong>is a work of great understanding told with skill humour and compassion.</p><p><br></p>