The far side of the moon

'[A] vivid, inquiring memoir... A properly soul-searching book' - Tim Adams, Observer As one of our leading campaigners for justice, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has spent a lifetime getting to know his clients - from detainees in Guantánamo Bay to prisoners facing execution on Death Row - and finding out, in his own words, 'what makes them tick'. But for much of his life, closer to home, there was a man whose mind remained off limits: his own father. It was only years after Dick's death, when Clive inherited more than 3,000 of his letters, that he could finally take a breath and start to piece together the obsessive personality behind them. In The Far Side of the Moon , Stafford Smith seeks the broad conversation about mental illness that was not accessible in his earlier years, reflecting on his father's fragmented life together with that of Larry Lonchar, a client who also struggled with severe depression, and whose fate continues to preoccupy him. Following the critically acclaimed Injustice , this courageous new book is an indictment of the failures in our social and justice systems, a meditation on privilege and its consequences, and an intimate exploration of how the mind's hinterlands can impact a family and shape a life.