Kadian Journal
  • Published: 3 July 2014
  • ISBN: 9781448185955
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Kadian Journal

Formats & editions
EBook
3 Jul 2014
Paperback
1 Jul 2015
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A moving work of startling bravery and candour of a family dislocated and united by tragedy, and a beautiful and moving tribute to a son.

In July 2012 Thomas Harding’s fourteen-year-old son Kadian was killed in a bicycle accident. Shortly afterwards Thomas began to write. This book is the result.

Beginning on the day of Kadian’s death, and continuing to the one-year anniversary, and beyond, Kadian Journal is at once a record of grief, a moving tribute to a lost son, and a celebration of a life lived to its fullest.
  • Published: 3 July 2014
  • ISBN: 9781448185955
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
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About the author

Thomas Harding

Thomas Harding is an author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, among other publications. He co-founded a television station in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning documentary maker. He also ran a local newspaper in West Virginia, winning the West Virginia Association of Justice’s Journalist of the Year Award, before moving back to England in 2011, where he now lives with his family. He is the author of Hanns and Rudolf, a Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the JQ-Wingate Prize; the internationally acclaimed Kadian Journal: A Father’s Story; The House by the Lake, a Costa Biography Award and Orwell Prize nominee; and Blood on the Page, winner of the 2018 Golden Dagger Award for Non-Fiction.

portrait photo of Thomas Harding

Also by Thomas Harding

The House by the Lake
Blood on the Page
Hanns and Rudolf
See all

Praise for 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