You

Brilliant, innovative, gripping, hellish, unbelievable truth. You is driven by honesty, humanity, compassion and love. A guaranteed page-turner. A story of supernatural hope over terrible experience, of understanding and even forgiveness. I won’t say any more. To unpack the magic of this art would spoil You for you.

-- Nick Child * The Alienation Experience *

You, by Phil Whitaker, tells the story of a father whose teenage daughter cut him out of her life after he left her mother. Told in flashbacks as he makes his way across the country to meet her for the first time in seven years, unsure if she will turn up at the rendezvous, it is a tale of inherited hurts and modern manipulation. The premise may sound familiar but its execution soars above similar tales, offering the reader an incisive portrayal of family breakdown and the damage caused by a vindictive parent from a father’s point of view.

-- Jackie Law * neverimitate *

The “you” of Whitaker’s emotionally charged novel is the narrator’s daughter. Stevie Buchanan, fiftysomething art therapist, is a victim of “parental alienation”, a severing of relations between parents and children as a result of marriage or relationship breakdown. In urgently, insistently addressing his daughter, a 21-year-old student, Stevie does the very thing he is prevented from doing in person, as he has been estranged from her for seven years. His desperation fuels flights of imagination in which, together, the pair revisit scenes of family history going back generations to examine the domino effect of traumas that repeat themselves with devastating effect.

-- Jane Housham * The Guardian *

You can be appreciated on a number of levels. Firstly the language and the writing which is of the highest quality. Whitaker seems to put his prose together effortlessly creating word pictures and word thoughts that stay with you for several pages. Secondly his ability to characterise again seems to be effortless. I’m sure it isn’t! But for the reader it’s the end result that resonates and the characters here, especially Stevie, are real and substantially drawn. Thirdly, and arguably most importantly the theme of this book, parental alienation. If it’s not a term you’re familiar with, take heart. Neither was I. But I am now and how!

-- Gill Chedgey * Nudge Book Magazi