Ned Beauman (1985) was born in London. His debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction and the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was long listed for the Man Booker Prize. His third novel, Glow, from which this excerpt is taken, is published in 2014 by Sceptre in the UK.