CHRIS KILLEN

27-year old Chris Killen is already causing a stir with his explosive debut novel The Bird Room. The Bookseller and style bibles Vice and Dazed and Confused have hailed him as a leading new talent for 2009 and there is a huge buzz online due to the popularity of his blog Day of Moustaches, which won an award in 2008. Chris has recently been appointed a Writing Fellow at the University of Manchester's Creative Writing department, alongside M. J. Hyland and Martin Amis, and runs a regular literary club night "there's no point in not being friends with someone if you want to be friends with them."

'Much of The Bird Room's appeal is down to Killen's taut, sharp prose style - not flashy but alternately laconic, melancholy and dryly witty - that gives an edgy, sometimes creepy and very contemporary sense of beauty to the everyday and the banal.' Metro

STILL FRIENDS A DECADE ON? WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?For a while, Ian, Lauren and Paul shared the same friends, the same university, the same dreams and the same potential. Ten years on they are worlds apart. Call centres, charity shops and bedrooms that smell like cabbage were never part of the plan. The real world doesn't look quite like any of them imagined. But when Lauren, in a moment of nostalgia, cracks open a long-forgotten Hotmail account, she comes face to face with the people these three friends used to be . . .For two of them it will mean a new beginning to an old love story.Hilarious and heart-breaking, In Real Life paints a searingly honest portrait of a generation and captures a world where human connection is easier than ever before but where relationships remain just as tricky.