The Guardian's Nick Davies has penned a book deal to document the phone-hacking scandal (Image: The Guardian)

Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who played a central role in exposing the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World, has signed a book deal to document the scandal.

The book, entitled Hack Attack: How the Truth caught up with the World's Most Powerful Man, will be published by Random House in Britain and is due to be released in the second half of next year. Faber & Faber, an imprint of Macmillan, has snapped up the American publishing rights.

In a statement, the publisher said that Hack Attack would "provide an authoritative account and commentary on the News International scandal, including new revelations".

Davies was responsible for uncovering several key pieces of information relating to the phone-hacking scandal and how News International and the Metropolitan Police dealt with allegations.

In July 2009, he revealed that News International had secretly paid more than £1 million to settle cases that could have led to the emergence of damaging evidence about the extent of phone hacking at the tabloid. Later that month, he provided MPs with an explosive internal email in which a junior reporter attached transcripts of hacked voicemail messages and indicated that they had been prepared "for Neville", an apparent reference to the chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck.

Over the ensuing two years, The Guardian was the only news organisation that consistently pursued the phone-hacking scandal. News International and its chief executive Rebekah Brooks claimed that the paper had "substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public" in its coverage of phone hacking.

Davies told The Guardian's Media Talk podcast earlier this month that other news outlets "didn't treat [the allegations] seriously enough", adding that he believed they had been "restrained by what we call the Old Boys Act in Fleet Street".

The award-winning journalist's most recent book was Flat Earth News, the 2008 work in which he examined "falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media".

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