Alex Preston was born in 1979 and lives with his family in London. His first novel, This Bleeding City, was an international bestseller, won the Spear’s Best First Book Award and the Edinburgh International Festival Readers’ First Book Award and was selected for Waterstone’s New Voices 2010. It has been translated into twelve languages. Preston writes and reviews for the New Statesman and the Observer and is a regular panellist on BBC2’s The Review Show.