'When we first meet Grace Allcock, she's prone and anaesthetised, about to get a nose-job. The scene is nearly unreadable, the unflinching prose keeping us alive to what "before" and "after" photographs would have us forget; this is a violent procedure, partly conducted with a hammer...'

Niall Griffiths' latest novel about celebrity culture, A Great Big Shining Star (Jonathan Cape, 2013) as reviewed in The Guardian.