This tremendous debut novel reads like the work of a veteran. John Preston has put in time for Time Out and as arts editor of The Sunday Telegraph, not to mention authoring a well respected travel book, but nothing in his CV hints at the versatility and sheer story-telling acumen showcased by Ghosting.

Radio announcer Dickie Chambers is Preston's anti-hero: a consummate professional and emotional black-hole. As a child he practised reading aloud to the wireless his mother would boom through the family home, acquiring along the way rhythm perfect BBC diction. Later, a stray locust slipped down the velvet-lined throat of the usual late-nighter and it was right-time right-place for Dickie and a voice that could "set off these little pictorial explosions".

Fame beckoned, first as radio personality, later a face in the rapidly expanding world of television. A Terry Wogan-cum-Robert Robinson for his time, Dickie's professional life was as spectacular as his private life was disastrous; a fall-out zone of failure and disappointment.

Dickie Chambers, you see, exists only in the glare of a camera, only when he's behind a hot microphone. The normal, everyday proprieties remain outside of his frame of reference; he is detached in social situations, adrift with small talk. He is of neither the past nor the future.

But, in telling his story, Dickie Chambers comes to understand the tragedy he calls a life and the way in which catastrophe - his father claimed by a freak swimming accident; his mother's madness; his own unconsummated marriage - haunts each step. He chooses to honeymoon in Switzerland because "it was the only country I'd been able to think of with an unreality to match my own." Ghosting, of course, is those stray signals that sometimes leave TV pictures with faint, ephemeral doppelgangers.

Preston musters all this beautifully. Essentially episodic - childhood, a brief stop in local rep, radio, TV - Ghosting retains an honest narrative drive. It's a book about Britain growing into mass communications, for sure smart and satirical (the interview with the PM springs to mind), but in Dickie's despair Preston also succeeds in finding real pathos. Dickie Chambers is a monster, he says, but even monsters have hearts.

Debuting as a paperback original will lend the book little ammunition in the annual bun-fight for literary awards, which is a pity. Like Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up!, Ghosting is an assured original arriving fully and immaculately formed out of apparently nowhere. Not for nothing has it been called one of the literary debuts of the decade.