What we lost last summer

It’s startling to read about extremely recent news events in a book presented as a novel. In Born Yesterday, Gordon Burn uses the McCanns, the floods, the foiled terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Blair’s farewell and Brown’s hello as the meat of his narrative. Although this isn’t a conventional novel, in that the narrator appears to be Gordon Burn (addressing himself as ‘he’) and his ‘journey’ consists merely of reflecting on last summer’s major news stories and conducting the occasional interview, its approach to the news is nevertheless novelistic.