The Unthinkable

Hardcover / ISBN-13: 9781914240263

Price: £20

ON SALE: 5th June 2025

Genre: Domestic Violence / Memoirs / True Stories / Violence In Society

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

“When she struck, it was with the cumulative rage of thirty years of hurt.”

David Challen grew up in the perfect home with the model family.

He also grew up inside a house which concealed his father’s manipulation and control.


One Saturday in 2010, David’s mother struck more than twenty blows to the back of her husband’s head with a hammer after thirty years of abuse. She then washed the dirty dishes from the lunch she had just cooked and left the house. In those few minutes, David’s life was changed forever.

Over the next decade, he led the fight to overturn her conviction; and in doing so he not only freed his mother and transformed the legal system, but also became a voice for the countless victims of coercive control across the country.

This is a powerful story of a son’s love for his mother; of an insidious form of abuse that must be better understood if we are to truly tackle it; and fight that changed the course of British legal history forever.