Just before Christmas Day in 1983, Andrev, the narrator of Bloody Awful in Different Ways, learns his dad is not his dad. Over the course of the next seven years, Andrev will live with a succession of seven stepfathers, each bearing heavy psychological baggage. He nicknames them all. The first, known as ‘The Plant Magician’, takes hallucinogens in a shed while knocking Andrev and his mother around the house indiscriminately. Christmas is when he hits Andrev in the face so hard that the truth emerges. ‘He’s not your real dad!’ his mother yells. ‘A real dad would never do that to his child.’

Bloody Awful in Different Ways is personal history bent into fiction. ‘If anything sounds made up,’ Andrev tells us, ‘then you can be sure that it is true.’ Across the seven years recounted in the book, plenty of disturbing scenes play out, most involving domestic abuse. One stepfather, known as ‘The Murderer’, in a fit of jealousy, throws Andrev’s fish tank out of the window, killing the fish. Another, ‘The Thief’, almost drowns Andrev’s mother in the bath. Elsewhere, a hamster is scalped and a duckling is killed. 

In conversational, often funny prose, Walden dodges the mawkish, opting to present a child’s view of life. We see the narrator’s desperate love for his mother and best friend, sibling scraps, school humiliations and teenage sexual fumblings. ‘When one day I come to write about this evening,’ Andrev says of