We’re reaching for the CD-RW right now

Louis de Bernieres was having a great time at the Edinburgh Festival. He was even getting some writing done as well–that is, till thieves stole his laptop from his home–containing the only copy of the sum output of his work-in-progress:

De Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, has lost 50 pages of his next book by leaving them on a laptop computer and going to the Edinburgh festival.

When he returned, he found that burglars had forced the window of the Harleston, Norfolk, rectory summerhouse where he left the laptop and stolen it. Yesterday he offered £500 for its return and a further £500 for information leading to the conviction of the thieves.

The machine contains four chapters of his novel, A Partisan’s Daughter.

Its loss was no light matter for a novelist who took a decade to produce his next book after Captain Corelli.

The new book, he said, was “going very well – I was on a roll. I mostly feel angry. It will save me a lot of time if I get this draft back, rather than having to start another one.

“I never make disk copies of my work because I am not a computer boffin. I prefer just to do print-outs on paper after I have finished each chapter . But I had not been doing that because I had been writing in the summerhouse and the printer was indoors. ”

Excuse us while we try to calm down the raging headache that seems to be sneaking up on us at the moment. And the desire to yell at the author for being so daft.