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GLOW is Ned Beauman’s third novel. An ambitious tale of multinational corporations, people from Burma going missing and street drugs, namely Glow.

The protagonist is Raf, from south London, who suffers from a syndrome that has set his body’s circadian rhythm to 25 hours, leaving him at the edge of society and out of sync with the world.

Unable to hold down a 9-5 job, he spends his time working on computer programmes, caring for a pirate radio station’s guard dog and researching the latest party drug of choice.

One day he wakes up and something isn’t quite right. Even more so that usual. And he is dragged into a mystery starting with the disappearance of a recent acquaintance from his home. This is a slow burner of a book, with great descriptive text but it doesn’t seem to have the drive of some of Beauman’s contemporaries.

Rachel Howdle