Cash is hard to come by in Columbia Road, where Cisco, her uptight brother and her downbeat boyfriend struggle to make ends meet. Cisco is scrathing around for temp work, her brother is realising that being a teen agony uncle has a shelf life and her man of the moment is lost to an online game with a million bucks at stake. That's when their landlord, a property impresario called Cartier, makes an offer they can't transform the place into a virtual show home, with a cam in every room and the three can stay on rent free. Except Cartier has a hidden agenda, and privacy comes at a price.
Author
Matt Whyman has written widely for all ages across a range of subjects - in fiction, advice and memoir. His adult books include Man or Mouse, Columbia Road, Oink! My Life With Minipigs (published in paperback as Pig in the Middle), and Walking with Sausage Dogs (Hodder). For teens, he is the award-winning author of titles including Superhuman, XY, XY:100, Boy Kills Man, The Wild (Hodder), the So Below trilogy, Inside the Cage, Goldstrike (Simon & Schuster), The Savages and American Savage (Hot Key Books) Matt has also written many books under different names. Notably, he serves as literary executive for the reclusive Romanian End Time theorist, folk tale scholar and Carnegie-nominated mystery writer, Lazlo Strangolov. Two children's novels by Lazlo have surfaced to date - Feather and Bone and Tooth and Claw (Walker). Co-writing with Michelle Misra, under the pen name of Jack Carson, Matt is responsible for the Battle Champions action series for younger readers (Simon & Schuster). A graduate from the University of East Anglia's MA in Creative Writing, Matt is often invited to teach the subject for writers of all ages. Recently, he has hosted workshops across Russia and the Middle East. He has also served on judging panels for the Costa Children's Book of the Year Award and the Booktrust Teenage Book Prize. In 1995, Matt became the first agony uncle for 19 magazine, and has subsequently written regular advice columns for B, Fox Kids, AOL UK and an 18 year residency at Bliss. Over the years he has co-presented a series of ITV's cult Saturday morning show, Love Bites, and a live weekly phone-in on LBC. He is currently resident agony uncle on BBC Radio 1's The Surgery and a relationship advisor for TheSite.org - the UK's leading advice and information resource for 16-25 year olds. Matt has written many national health awareness campaigns - for clients including BBC Radio 1, Brook Advisory, NSPCC, Macmillan and the Health Education Authority - as well as numerous articles and features for national newspapers and magazines. He has also fronted several long-running opinion pages for Eve and Marie Claire. Matt is married with four children, and lives in West Sussex, UK.
