Phone

´WHATEVER YOU DO hang on to the phone...! ...! Feel the smoothness of its bevelled screen ...! ...! Place your thumb in the soft depression of its belly-button - turn it over and over...! ...! A five hundred-quid worry bead - and all I worry about is losing the bloody thing...! ...!´ For the four characters at the heart of Will Self´s brilliantly acute novel of our times the five hundred-quid worry bead in their pocket may be both a blessing and a curse. For elderly Dr Zachary Busner it is a mysterious object - ´NO CALLER ID - How should this be interpreted? Is it that the caller is devoid of an identity due to some psychological or physical trauma?´ - but also it´s his life line to his autistic grandson Ben, whose own connection with technology is, in turn, a vital one. For Jonathan De´Ath , aka ´the Butcher´, MI6 agent, the phone may reveal his best kept secret of all: that Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, and highly-trained tank commander - is Jonathan ´s long time lover. And when technology, love and violence finally converge in the wreckage of postwar Iraq, the Colonel and the Spy´s dalliance will determine the destiny of nations.Uniting our most urgent contemporary concerns: from the ubiquitous mobile phone to a family in chaos; from the horror of modern war, to the end of privacy...