NONESUCH, THE NEW NOVEL FROM FRANCIS SPUFFORD, NOW A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers. Backroom Boys is a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers, to those whose imaginings take shape not in words but in mild steel and carbon fibre and lines of code. Above all, it is a celebration of big dreams achieved with slender means.Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race – and who now are sending the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars.

'A wonderful accomplishment –

Backroom Boys sharply evokes a lost world of Dan Dare,

Look and Learn and Meccano, and goes on to show us how that world was never lost: that it is, in fact, the secret history of today.' Ken MacLeod

'Unreservedly marvellous . . . Francis Spufford is the Tom Wolfe of technology journalism.'

Focus

'Provides start-to-finish enjoyment . . . [Spufford] can make the heart leap simply by detailing what engineers do with mild steel or carbon fibre.'

Sunday Times

'I don't want to pretend that

Backroom Boys is perfect; It's just as near to it as makes no difference.'

Daily Telegraph

'The man writes like a dream – informed, fresh, racy prose . . .

You wouldn't think that a book describing the fall and rise of British technologies since 1945 could be unputdownable, but Spufford shows it can be done.'

Guardian