Reversed Forecast (21 page)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
2007

Hauntings. History. Hysteria.

In this uproarious contemporary ghost story, the medieval past takes on a human face and roams the backstreets and bypasses of 21st-century Ashford, bringing chaos to the lives of all those it touches. No one is safe: not uptight, upstanding Beede, nor Kane (his laid-back, drug-dealing son), who share a home together but have nothing else in common - bar a mutual obsession with the same woman; Elen, an enigmatic chiropodist, whose unstable husband, Dory, believes that their only son, Fleet, has been fathered by the deranged ghost of an evil, 500-year-old court-jester.

Darkmans
conjours up a magical yet somehow instantly familiar world in which language crackles like static - twitching with barely containable energy. Past and present mingle and blur, and the lines between fantasy and reality, sanity and madness are continually rubbed out and redrawn … but by whose hand?

‘A loud shout of glorious, untidy, angry, joyous life. At the end of 838 blinding, high-octane pages, I was bereft that there weren’t 838 more’

Guardian

‘[Barker] is one of the most exhilarating, audacious and, for want of a better word, ballsy writers of her generation’

Observer

‘
Darkmans
is an ambitious, daring, delightful and compelling work. If any young British writer - male or female - is dreaming big nightmares and taking jaw-dropping risks, it’s Barker’

Scotland on Sunday

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

The Isle of Sheppey: strange, flat and empty like the moon. In front of this bare, blasted backdrop, a host of characters try to manage lives that are anything but. There’s Luke, purveyor of dot-to-dot pornography; Connie, the inconstant optician and Lily, just 17 and full of outrageous anger. And then there’s Lost Property Officer Nathan, alopecia-ridden Jim and mysterious drifter Ronny, bound bleakly together by the tide of an awful secret past which refuses to retreat.

Wide Open
is a beautiful, startling and heart-breaking novel about the unfashionable corners of life, from one of our most brilliantly unconventional literary talents, Nicola Barker.

‘Razor-sharp comic sensibility … flawless’

Independent on Sunday

‘Outrageously well-written … a stunningly original novel by the most unexpected talent around’

Time Out

‘The brilliance of Barker’s style is beyond question … Stricken, troubling and grand,
Wide Open
is unmistakably an important novel by an important novelist’

Spectator

WINNER OF THE DAVID HIGHAM PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE PEN MACMILLAN SILVER PEN AWARD FOR SHORT STORIES

Layla Carter, 16, from North London, is utterly overwhelmed by her plus-size nose. Rosemary, recently widowed and the ambivalent owner of a bipolar tomcat, meets a satyr in her kitchen and asks, ‘Can I feel your fur?’ In these ten short stories, a series of marginalised characters seek truth in the obsession and oppression of everyday existence, via a canine custody battle, sex in John Lewis and some strangely expressive desserts.

Love Your Enemies
is the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker’s loving depiction of the beautiful, the grotesque and the utterly bizarre in the lives of overlooked suburban Britons, with results that are exuberantly individual and enticingly strange.

‘One of the most exhilarating, audacious and ballsy writers of her generation’

Observer

‘Barker’s writing is an antidote to, a laughing cure for, and an energiser for the more moribund forms of Englishness and English fiction’

ALI SMITH
,
Guardian

‘Like Roald Dahl, Barker can take a commonplace situation - cooking a meal, starting a diet, taking in a stray - and use it to bounce off into a surreal fantasy world’

Independent

Summer, 1981. Medve, 16 years old and 6-foot-3 in her crocheted stockings, is marooned in a semi-derelict hotel on a tiny island off the coast of Devon. There’s nothing to do but paint novelty Thatcher mugs, dream of literary murderer Jack Henry Abbott, and despair of her gothically unprepossessing family - including Mo, her anal-probe-inventing mother; Poodle, her shamefully flat-chested sister; and four-year-old Feely, who wants to grow up to be a bulimic (he thinks it’s a veterinarian who specialises in livestock). Until one day a ginger stranger arrives, stinking of antiseptic …

One of our most brilliantly unconventional contemporary writers, Nicola Barker roots out the darkly surreal in a forgotten corner of England, with results that are hilariously original.

‘Makes you wince, gasp and laugh out loud’

Independent on Sunday

‘A sort of literary tonic for enervation and grumpiness … a welcome despatch from Barker’s determinedly peverse and ungovernable imagination’

Guardian

‘A rites of passage novel, refreshingly free of rose-tinted sentiment … very funny’

Literary Review

An attractive park in Palmers Green plays host to Phil, a chronically shy gardener who feels truly at home only with his plants. He and his gentle colleague Ray, a man with all the sense of a Savoy cabbage, are tortured by Doug, their imposing and unpredictable supervisor, and a malevolent one-legged ex-museum curator called Saleem. In love with the truck-obsessed Nancy, Phil strives nobly to maintain his equilibrium despite being systematically mystified, brutalised, drugged, derided and seduced. But when he loses his eyebrows, he decides to fight back.

Hilarious, poignant and frequently surreal,
Small Holdings
is another despatch from a neglected corner of everyday life by the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker.

‘An anarchic and lovingly perverse writer’

ALI SMITH

‘Funny and intelligent … Barker’s sense of plot and comic timing is faultless’

RACHEL CUSK
,
The Times

‘Marvellous … explodes into action, with Barker letting off fireworks and flares in all directions’

TLS

‘[Barker] writes of the comic and sometimes sinister surrealism of ordinary people’s lives, and the results are books to make you wince, gasp and laugh out loud’

Independent on Sunday