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.

The News Where You Are

Catherine O'Flynn

Penguin Group(CA)

As a presenter on Midlands TV's regional news, Frank Allcroft is a long way from journalism's cutting edge. Saddled with a gag-writer and limp one-liners, Frank is now officially "the unfunniest man on God's earth" and a local legend. It's not quite the career that he envisioned, but Frank thinks there are more important things in life: his wife Andrea, his mother Maureen and his daughter Mo. But as Frank reflects on his late father's legacy and the unexplained death of a much loved colleague, an unusual news report catches his eye. Compelled to investigate further, he finds the familiar concerns of middle age falling into perspective as he uncovers a bizarre and tragic tale of thwarted hopes...

Viking/Penguin Books

What Was Lost

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Henry Holt Company

The Finalists: Excerpts from the Five 2007 Costa Award-winning Books: No. II

A.L. Kennedy

Jean Sprackland

SIMON SEBAG-MONTEFIORE

Ann Kelley

Costa Publishing

A heartbreaking, yet hilarious, novel from the author of the best-selling, prize-winning What Was Lost.The News Where You Are tells the funny, touching story of Frank, a local TV news presenter in England. 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 whilst having to report endless local news stories and trying to cope with his resolutely miserable mother. The result is that rare thing: a page-turning novel that asks the big questions in an accessible way, and is laugh-out-loud funny, genuinely moving and ultimately uplifting.

Contemporary

Blackstone Audiobooks

Lori and Max and the Book Thieves

Children's Books

Animals

Firefly Press

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Books by Catherine O'Flynn