2002. The discovery of a crumbling, century-old ancestral novel in a New York bookshop sparks a moving literary mystery for a mother and her son. Trapped in a New York blizzard across three days, the son attempts to unravel the devastating truth surrounding the mysterious author with his mother in her Liverpool home. With the revelation that the books author was the uncle she once shared a house with in the 1941 Blitz, three generations of a working-class family's secrets unfold as he attempts to patch together ancestral rumors with newly-discovered newspaper evidence. Based on a true story,
The Boy Who Made the King Cry
maps the journey of a seventeen-year-old soldier-author from The Somme trenches to the Liverpool Blitz, via the New York publication of his inexplicable 1918 novel,
The Fighting Mascot
. But when the authenticity of this version is questioned, it becomes a race for the real story to be retold by the only person alive who knows the truth - his mother. What follows is a thrilling text and visual interpretation of propaganda and truth as we chart the journey of two writers from the same family, separated by a hundred years of war. A collage of facts and images result in a book-within-a-book -
- a story of literary truth, unreliable memoir and the responsibility of retelling family myths.