Piers Torday: finishing his father’s last novel

When Paul Torday died before completing work on The Death of an Owl, his son, children’s author Piers Torday, faced a dilemma: dare he do it for him?

It was the start of a new year and my father and I were trying to avoid discussing death. To be precise, his. He had been diagnosed with stage 3 kidney cancer seven years earlier, just months after the publication of his first book, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. His illness had stalked his subsequent publishing career like a bitter, mordant rival, thwarting him where possible. Symptoms made sitting at a desk to write painful and uncomfortable. Toxic side effects from treatments drained him of energy. Hospital appointments nixed literary festival invitations.

Yet he never complained, and, thanks in part to the same toxic drugs, did produce, remarkably, seven novels and two novellas over the next seven years. But now his system could no longer tolerate the medication, and he was in decline. So when on this cold January morning, looking pale and gaunt, he told me he was writing a new book, I felt a surge of hope. It was called The Death of an Owl, he told me, and was about an ambitious politician who runs over an owl by mistake and tries to cover it up, with disastrous consequences.

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