How to become a literary star

The charismatic young anti-hero of this first novel, Cal Cunningham, wants to be a writer. Whiling away the hours at the New York bookshop where he works by day, he concocts wild dreams of literary stardom. By night, he goes out on the tiles, attempting to pick up girls - and, of course, to gather more autobiographical material for his burgeoning masterpiece. The problem is, on those rare occasions when he sits down at his desk to write, he can't think of a single line.

Cal seems to want his literary exertions to be as swift and painless as they tend to seem in all those films about writers where someone pounds away at a typewriter for a few brief scenes, until minutes later - abracadabra - they have magically finished a book. Instead of ever knuckling down to some writing, each Sunday Cal tells his flatmate Stewart about his latest nocturnal adventures in downtown Manhattan.

What Cal doesn't know is that Stewart - a quiet, surly law student with no evident literary ambitions - has been collecting these accounts of his escapades, and has finished a novel about them. Worse still, the book (complete with Cal's own working title, Almost Like Suicide) is brilliantly written. But then fate intervenes. Stewart gets killed in a bicycle accident. Cal, ever the opportunist, sells the novel under his own name for astronomical publication and film rights, and becomes the overnight literary sensation he always wanted to be. That is, until someone finds out the secret of his success.

Of course, this is just the beginning of the many twists and turns in the plot of this brilliantly well-crafted thriller, as Cal spins an ever-increasing web of lies to protect himself. Canadian journalist John Colapinto has a sharp eye for a story, and the roller-coaster narrative he has fashioned here rivals Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley for pure suspense.

There are some flaws. Cleverly, however, Colapinto's plot pre-empts most potential criticisms. Any complaints of sloppy prose can be effortlessly fended off, since the story is narrated by someone who literally can't write. And some of the more obvious plot developments are justified by Cal's blundering ineptitude as an amateur criminal.

While literary thrillers are all too commonplace these days, About the Author is that much rarer, more original specimen: a thriller about literature. Colapinto's mercilessly satirical take on New York's literary world make for some of the best scenes in the book. Cal's agent, Blackie Yeager, for instance, is a hilariously well-drawn figure, with a laugh sounding "like sheet metal being torn by a machine".

In a strange case of life imitating art, it transpires that About the Author has apparently just been won in a bidding war for film rights by Steven Spielberg's company DreamWorks. Uncannily, the manuscript of Almost Like Suicide in the novel was also sold to DreamWorks. At this rate, the next piece of news will surely be the shock revelation that About the Author was never written by John Colapinto at all, but by some forgotten dead flatmate.