The News Where You Are

Item: The News Where You Are
Author: WhichBook

Catherine O'Flynn

Singing the song of the unsung and urban disenchantment is the speciality of our forty-something regional newsreader. Vivid portraits of family life and his purposefully miserable mother provide scope for grim themes aplenty, compellingly countered by excellent narrative, heaps of compassion and a flow of laugh-aloud satire. You will find this a haunting and moving novel.

Extract

After she’d gone he drank the coffee and thought about what she’d said. He looked at the face in the photo. Had Michael really hoped for the gentle fall of other deaths and other stories to cover his quickly and soundlessly, to be lost forever in that endless layering of beginnings and ends? Every day at work Frank added more news, more facts, more faces to the vast multi-layered mosaic of the city and amidst all this Michael was an empty space. It was always the gaps that drew Frank’s attention. They seemed to matter more than the other pieces.

Parallels