The news where you are - Catherine O'Flynn

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.