Books by Gordon Burn

'The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more.' By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club at the age of fifteen years and eight months in 1953. Two years later he won his first England cap and Walter Winterbottom, then England manager, referred to him as 'the spirit of British football'. On GBP15-a-week and living at Mrs Watson's boarding house at 5 Birch Avenue in Manchester, Edwards was the most prized of the Busby Babes. Then in February 1958 came Munich.Half a decade later George Best represented United reborn. 'Georgie' of the boutiques and dolly birds; 'El Beatle' of the European Cup in '68 and European Player of the Year; in the opinion of Pele, the most naturally talented footballer that ever lived. Retired at 27 and reduced to the role of Chelsea barfly and tabloid perennial; George, where did it all go wrong? An investigation into a club, two personalities and an England that has all but disappeared, Best & Edwards plots the course and trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways.

Summer 2007 was an extraordinarily rich time for news. Floods. Foot and mouth. The disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine McCann. The arrival of Gordon Brown. Terror attacks in Glasgow. And Gordon Burn, artist, journalist and true-crime author, has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into an utterly unique novel about the way news is made, and how the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us. A daring and thrilling novel from one of the most astute observers of celebrity and tragedy, that is sure to make the headlines itself.

An account of two people - Fred and Rose West - who lived together, raised (and killed) children, provided sexual services for anyone interested, and pretended to provide social services for single women. Investigated and told by one of the greatest journalists and writers of the last twenty years, this is the most powerful and upsetting true crime book you will ever read.

How does it feel to be never allowed to die? In his classic debut novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder. Fictional characters jostle for space with real life stars - from John Lennon to Doris Day and Sammy Davis Jnr - as Burn, in a breathtaking act of appropriation, reinvents the popular culture of the post-war years. As beautifully written as it is disturbing, Alma Cogan remains a stingingly relevant exploration of the sad, dark underside of fame.'An extraordinary, unprecedented novel. Audacious, innovative and totally compelling.' William Boyd

It seemed the case of the notorious Yorkshire Ripper was finally closed when Peter Sutcliffe was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981. But in the early 1980s Gordon Burn spent three years living in Sutcliffe's home town of Bingley, researching his life. A modern classic, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son offers one of the most penetrating and provocative insights into the mind of a murderer ever written.'A book which will, with some justice, be compared to In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song. It's as if Thomas Hardy were also present at the writing of this account of the Yorkshire Ripper.' Norman Mailer

Norman Miller used to be one of Fleet Street's finest. Now he's a middle-aged, burned-out hack with a gift for the sensational story, the shouting tabloid lead. But as he reports on a series of brutal murders and sex crimes, he's forced to wonder whether he is just a witness - or part of some deeper pattern of cause and effect . . .'Remarkable . . . Devastating . . . Required reading for anyone interested in what British fiction should be doing today.' Stephen Amidon, Esquire