Ink

In the depths of a winter's night a man throws himself into the River Thames. When his body is pulled from the water there are no clues to who he was, no distinguishing marks, nothing ...It is 1989 and Fleet Street is in crisis. So too is Hugh Byrne, a journalist on one of the few remaining papers left there. Suffering acute writer's block, he is sent to cover the story of the drowned man before being ignominiously banished to the bowels of the building to update the Queen Mother's obituary. Downstairs he finds himself in the lair of the mysterious green-carders, a small army of disdained unfortunates who are the only people who know how the paper actually works.As the newspaper prepares for its move to another glass place along the river, Hugh is drawn into uncovering the identity of the drowned man and begins to wonder: is it possible for someone to die twice?Ink is John Preston's darkly comic and absorbing account of a world in transition from a grimy past into an altogether more gleaming present.