**Peter Benson *was born in Vienna, Austria in 1956. He spent his childhood travelling with his parents, and after an abortive university career and a series of agricultural jobs, settled in Somerset in the 1980s. He published his first novel, THE LEVELS * in 1987, and this and his subsequent novels...

**Peter Benson *was born in Vienna, Austria in 1956. He spent his childhood travelling with his parents, and after an abortive university career and a series of agricultural jobs, settled in Somerset in the 1980s. He published his first novel, THE LEVELS * in 1987, and this and his subsequent novels won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Author's Club First Novel Award, the Encore Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and established him as 'one of the most distinctive voices in modern British fiction.'