The News Where You Are

Catherine O’Flynn author of the Man Booker prize winning What Was Lost offers a ’funny moving acutely observed story about family and loss’ in The News Where You Are.Frank Allcroft a regional TV news presenter has just had a ratings boost. His puns a website declares makes him ’the unfunniest man on God’s Earth’. Mortified colleagues wonder how he stands being a public joke.But Frank doesn’t mind. As long as Andrea and Mo his wife and eight-year-old daughter are happy who gives a stuff what others think? Besides Frank has a couple of other matters on his mind.He has taken to investigating the death of Phil his (actually quite funny) predecessor killed in a mysterious hit and run six months ago. Also he’s telling Mo about the architect grandfather she never met by taking her to see vanished and soon-to-be-vanished buildings.Because Frank knows that it is between what we see and what we can’t what has gone and what’s left behind that the answers lie. . . Very funny warm and moving The New Where You Are is a story of family friendship and trying to reconnect with the past before it is gone.’Under the wisecracking surface . . . surprisingly profound’ The Times’A flow of laugh-out-loud satire’ Independent on Sunday’Awesomely talented’ Tatler’Seriously uplifting hilarious. A funny moving acutely observed story about family and loss. A pleasurable satisfying gem of a novel’ Scotland on Sunday’A blend of Dickens and Alan Bennett. I loved it’ Fay Weldon’A comic genius’ Daily Mail Catherine O’Flynn was born in 1970 and raised in Birmingham the youngest of six children. Her parents ran a sweet shop. She worked briefly in journalism then at a series of shopping centres. She has also been a web editor a postwoman and a mystery shopper.