The Girl Who Was Going To Die

A brilliant novel that is both utterly of-the-moment and linguistically innovativeBritain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'. She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Reason and the real world are quickly relinquished as Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV. Buffeted by the demands of her new public, and her private terrors about her own mortality, Susan starts to lose control of everything.A chillingly accurate satire on phoney, manipulative media, the cult of celebrity and its corruptive effects, The Girl Who Was Going to Die is a very funny, moving book about the brittleness of reality. But what makes this novel a tour-de-force is that it is told entirely in dialogue, giving Susan's story a terrible, thrilling immediacy - an authenticity of voice unique in contemporary fiction.