2011's most heart-breaking debut

Every family has a story. Mal was ours.

He was always different from the other kids. Larger than life. Trips to pantomimes were ruined by him stripping off his clothes. But people loved him. Especially Lou; it seemed like their love would last forever. Then something happened that changed everything . . . Mal grew up.

Bed is a coming-of-age story like no other. It chronicles what love, loss and family can do to you in a lifetime.

"Hilarious and tragic; a perfectly brilliant debut" - * The Times *

"Staggering, inventive and heartbreakingly beautiful." - * Esquire *

"A story [about] families and the love that sustains and smothers. Bed is brilliantly imagined" - * Daily Mail *

"Number One Summer Read" - * Grazia *

"David Whitehouse has taken what might be a gimmicky hook in a lesser writer's hands--a romance triangulating around a bedridden media spectacle, the world's most obese man--and turned it, through lapidary prose, into a soulful meditation on a fraternal love as singular as it is universal." - * Teddy Wayne, author of KAPITOIL *

"Brilliant and very expressive. Mal is an extremely vivid firework of a character." - * Waterstones.co.uk *

"The best new novel I've read in ages." - * Guardian *