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.

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.

Set in Birmingham, The News Where You Are tells the funny, touching story of Frank, a local TV news presenter. Beneath his awkwardly corny screen persona, Frank is haunted by disappearances: the mysterious hit and run that killed his predecessor Phil Smethway; the demolition of his father's post-war brutalist architecture; and the unmarked passing of those who die alone in the city. Frank struggles to make sense of these absences while having to report endless local news stories of holes opening up in people's gardens and trying to cope with his resolutely miserable mother. 
The result is that rare thing: a page-turning novel which asks the big questions in an accessible way, and is laugh-out-loud funny, genuinely moving and ultimately uplifting.

Catherine O'Flynn

'I'm looking forward to seeing you and Laura and getting my first taste of "abroad".' 
 
Eamonn Lynch stares at the letter announcing the arrival of his father, Dermot, and tries to think of an excuse to put him off. But Dermot is here, and soon discovers that Eamonn lives on a Spanish building site; that Laura's left; that it's just the two of them for two long, hot weeks. 
 
Amongst the British expats' barbecuing and bickering, they discover the truth about each other and the family past and uncover a shocking secret at the heart of this beleaguered community.

Catherine O'Flynn

Books by Catherine O'Flynn

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