Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Madeline McCann and John Smeaton all feature in a book set in the busy summer of 2007. But it is not the characters or the plot which form the core of "Born Yesterday".

Instead, Burn's priority is to examine the modern media's role in the creation and manipulation of the news events of the season.

"News stories are now implicitly fictionalised — the people in them become sort of soap opera characters, characters in a fictional construct," Burn said.

"Once you see somebody on the TV and then you see them have lunch, they exist somewhere between reality and fiction — a sort of limbo between these two.

"So I'd go to an event, make people at the centre of the event — reporters, the media, the police, anyone who came in the aftermath of the news event — instantly into characters in a novel."

"Born Yesterday" continues a major theme of much of Burn's work — a preoccupation with celebrity. What brings the characters together is their existence in the public consciousness.

"Drawing parallels between the blind eye of the new prime minister, the eye defects of Madeleine and Robert Murat, the man arrested on suspicion of her abduction, Burn threads the summer's events together, finding pattern in the detail.

"They were coincidences, but coincidences that no-one seemed to have noticed. I didn't have a conversation with anyone about them, I never read about them. What made it a novel was that attempt to make links between the visible world and the invisible world, the collective consciousness. The Madeleine McCann thing happened in May and then there was the (Blair-Brown) handover in June. When it did actually happen it was so odd — Brown being so uncomfortable in front of cameras and with the press, after a lifetime in politics, was in itself sort of disconcerting," he said.

"So there was a mood of unease generated by Madeleine and by him, and the eyes were an emblem of it. I think the book was about how those stories and images seep in — a bit like the lines of a song that gets into your brain. The coverage of news stories now is so saturated you absorb it through your pores without knowing that it's happening."

This description itself parallels Burn's own journalistic methods in preparing his earlier books, including non-fiction works detailing the lives of serial killers Peter Sutcliffe — the "Yorkshire Ripper" — and Fred and Rosemary West.

Burn spent two years with the Sutcliffe family, absorbing the tiny details of their lives and the roots of the future murderer.

"They're very complicated those relationships. You build up a connection with people. With the Sutcliffes we exchanged Christmas cards for a while. At the time it's a very intimate kind of relationship," he said.

Burn's book on the Wests, "Happy like Murderers", was one which took a much greater emotional toll than his book on Sutcliffe.

Gordon Burn

"In a strange way there was no comparison between the stories," he said.

"When I turned up to do the West story there was no clue that there was all this sexual torture and horrible stuff that emerged a year later.

"The first I knew about what lay in store was the committal proceedings for Rose West, when all the evidence that would come up at trial was read out.

"For a week a man just stood up and announced what the witnesses would be saying. At the end of that week I wanted to pull out."

Burn relived some of his experiences with the media frenzy surrounding the cases in the novel "Fullalove" — the story of an ageing tabloid hack. "I liked the idea of blurring between me writing both books, blowing the whistle on myself in a way; laying down the tricks of the trade," Burn said.

"But the reception when I then did go to the West trial from the tabloid hacks covering it wasn't exactly welcoming."

As well as a novelist, Burn is a well known art writer with a string of interviews with '60s icons, including David Hockney and Andy Warhol, and a collection of Damien Hirst interviews published in 2001. He plans to write another book but indicated he is unlikely to return to fiction.

"Having done 'Born Yesterday', I don't know if I want to write another conventional novel. I don't want characters or plots," he said.

"Even with fiction I can't even make stuff up. I think imagination is highly overrated. I'm not really interested in invention, making stuff up. If you've got an interesting individual enough take on things, you don't really have to invent that much."

* Gordon Burn appears at Eden Court's OneTouch Theatre at 5.30pm on Friday as part of the fifth Inverness Book Festival.

Other authors appearing include Booker Prize winner James Kelman, influential 1960s music producer Joe Boyd, broadcasters Lesley Riddoch and Tom Morton, crime writers Allan Guthrie, Denise Mina and Nicola Upson, novelists Scarlett Thomas, Jon McGregor, Alan Bissett and Anne Donovan, and cyclist turned writer Richard Moore.

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