Conville & Walsh

In 2000 Matt Beaumont wrote E, a widely acclaimed and cultishly successful satire about the appalling antics of a troupe of dissolute media slags. Oh, E also had the distinction of being written entirely in emails. After its publication, Matt moved on to other things, leaving his dysfunctional rabble to their own devices. But now he revisits them in E2, and he finds them eight years older, but not even a tiny bit wiser. Interweaving, overlapping and sometimes colliding, the novel’s multiple storylines include an unwanted pregnancy, a gross miscarriage of justice and the first cigarettes designed especially for children’s teeny-weeny fingers. It also features Jean Paul Gaultier, Margaret Thatcher: The Perfume and a gay Jewish suit rendered to Guantanamo on suspicion of being an Islamist suicide bomber.

Again Matt tells the story in emails, but this time he also uses the full arsenal of cyberspace – blogs, eBay, YouTube, MySpace – to propel the narrative at the speed of 20 megabyte broadband. The publication of E2 in both the UK and the USA will coincide with the broadcast of NBC’s TV dramatisation of E.