Summer 2007 was an extraordinarily rich time for news. Floods. Foot and mouth. The disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine McCann. The arrival of Gordon Brown. Terror attacks in Glasgow. And Gordon Burn, artist, journalist and true-crime author, has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us. A daring and thrilling novel from one of the most astute observers of celebrity and tragedy, that is sure to make the headlines itself.

Gordon Burn was the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He was also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards. His last book, Sex & Violence, Death and Silence, was a collection of his essays on art.