Man-child’s trials and tribulations

ONLY those closest to someone with autism can ever know what it is really like. The insidious nature of the condition prevents the sufferer from understanding it least of all.

Broadcaster and writer Liam Nolan has written a searingly honest, loving and, at times, heartbreaking account of his son, Liamy's autism. Liam wrote a diary during one week in August when he and his wife Oonagh's 10-year-old autistic son came home for his holidays from the institution where he was placed in full-time care.

It is an account in which pain and laughter, happiness and despair come together in a disquieting mix through which a strange and lovely child strides and screams, locked into his own unreachable world.