Over forty million people a year travel to Las Vegas, more than to Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7, with no moral debits.

Award-winning writer Timothy O'Grady lived in Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he talked to people who had grown up there, the children of the card dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers - young people who had borne witness to this strange city all their lives. One had her student loans and credit card limits stolen by her father. Another fled a sequence of exploiters until she found herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. There was the boy whose father entered him into a drinking contest when he was eight, the casino owner's son, the erudite contortionist turned stripper. Each told their own tale.

In Children of Las Vegas, O'Grady renews his partnership with photographer Steve Pyke. Through short essays, Pyke's portraits and ten witness testimonies, he pierces the city's glittering façade to reveal the darker reality that lies beneath.

Timothy O'Grady was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London, Spain and Poland. He is the author of four works of non-fiction and four novels. His debut novel Motherland won the David Higham Prize for the best first novel in 1989. I Could Read the Sky, a collaboration with photographer Steve Pyke, won the Encore Award for best second novel of 1997. It was filmed and also travelled as a stage show. I Could Read the Sky, Children of Las Vegas and Monaghan are published by Wilton Square.

Steve Pyke, MBE is a photographer known for his intimate and intense black and white portraits of extraordinary thinkers, creators, and artists of out time. He has spent the last 40 years seeing the world through a creative lens. Born in Leicester, UK and residing in London and NYC for many years, Steve now lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.