10 books by Nicola Barker
Requirements: ePUB reader, 6.8 MB
Overview: Nicola Barker (born 30 March 1966) is an English novelist and short story writer. Typically she writes about damaged or eccentric people in mundane situations, and has a fondness for bleak, isolated settings. Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize), Wide Open (winner of the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and Clear (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Genre: Fiction / Contemporary
1. Burley Cross Postbox Theft: Reading other people’s letters is always a guilty pleasure. But for two West Yorkshire policemen – contemplating a cache of 26 undelivered missives, retrieved from a back alley behind the hairdresser’s in Skipton – it’s also a job of work. The quaint moorside village of Burley Cross has been plunged into turmoil by the theft of the contents of its postbox, and when PC Roger Topping takes over the case, which his higher-ranking schoolmate Sergeant Laurence Everill has so far failed to crack, his expectations of success are not high. Yet Topping’s investigation into the curtain-twitching lives of Jeremy Baverstock, Baxter Thorndyke, the Jonty Weiss-Quinns, Mrs Tirza Parry (widow), and a splendid array of other weird and wonderful characters, will not only uncover the dark underbelly of his scenic beat, but also the fundamental strengths of his own character. The denizens of Burley Cross inhabit a world where everyone’s secrets are worn on their sleeves, pettiness becomes epic, little is writ large.
2. Five Miles from Outer Hope: Barker’s teen queen heroine, Medve, has no truck with the niceties of polite expression. Medve is six foot three and living with her family in a crumbling art deco hotel on a small island, off the coast of England. She is "single-minded, oestrogen-fuelled and cunning", with a foul mouth and scattershot approach to story telling. Medve means bear in Hungarian and she gives the novel all the bite, ferocity and feral charm of her namesake.
3. Heading Inland: Barker conjures up a fantastical world where an unborn baby escapes an unsuitable mother through a belly-button zip, a disgruntled job applicant steals his interviewer’s garden pond and a new father feeds his hand to an owl. Her imagination is truly weird and wonderful, but what makes these stories work so well is that they are based on reality – a woman falls in love with her husband because his buttons are done up wrongly, a bitter old woman tries to trick a tramp, a man frees eels from an East End pie shop, a bride throws a tantrum on her wedding day. This collection brings to life a world which simmers just below the surface of the imagination, proving again that Nicola Barker is one of the most original young writers of her generation.
4. Reversed Forecast: The first novel by the acclaimed, brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker, prize-winning author of The Yips. Reversed Forecast is a vivid snapshot of pre-gentrification London and a tale of finding love in less-than-scenic places. Chance meetings between its cast of inimitably odd individuals—Ruby, the betting-shop cashier; violently disturbed (and disturbing) Vincent; Samantha, the would-be cabaret singer; and Little Buttercup, the never-quite-made-it greyhound—result in the unlikeliest of couples. There’s always the risk that it could all be disastrous as characters try—or don’t try—to make winning combinations.
5. Behindlings: Wesley, spurting with kinetic energy, nasty wit, and kindness to animals, ought to be a star. Or so it seems to those who nip at his heels, turn up everywhere he goes, and lie in wait for him around every corner. They are his followers – he calls them Behindlings. And they make quite an ensemble, with their own questionable intentions, irritating habits, and weird manners. But they bury all disagreement in the common pursuit of their prize, their Wesley. There are those who simply stay put. Catherine Turpin lies defiantly in the bed she makes for herself while, outside, her failings are broadcast widely, painted on walls, even. When one of Wesley’s newest followers, Jo Bean, turns out to be more interested in confronting Catherine than sticking with the behindlings, plots that have been twisted up come undone.
6. Clear: A Transparent Novel: On September 5, 2003, illusionist David Blaine entered a small Perspex box adjacent to London’s Thames River and began starving himself. Forty-four days later, on October 19, he left the box, fifty pounds lighter. That much, at least, is clear. And the rest? The crowds? The chaos? The hype? The rage? The fights? The lust? The filth? The bullshit? The hypocrisy?
7. The Three Button Trick and Other Stories
Nineteen of her finest short stories have been compiled into one startling, delightfully readable volume. It takes young Carrie twenty-one years and a chance meeting with an eighty-three-year-old widow to realize she fell victim to her husband’s “three button trick.” The main character in “Wesley” must work through his troubled childhood in a series of episodes involving masses of eels, an imaginary friend named Joy, and an unmentionable incident with an emu-owl. Whether describing erotic encounters behind clothing racks or a kleptomaniac with his organs on the wrong side, these stories never fail to surprise us, entertain us, and make us think.
8. Love Your Enemies
the short stories in ‘Love Your Enemies’ present a loving depiction of the beautiful, the grotesque and the utterly bizarre in the lives of overlooked suburban Britons. 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 enticingly strange 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.
9. Darkmans
If history is just a sick joke, then who exactly is telling it and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV’s court jester, whose favourite pastime was to burn people alive? Or is it Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII’s physician, who kindly wrote Scogin’s biography? This is a modern tale about two familiar subjects – love and jealousy.
10. Small Holdings
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.
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Mirror:
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Darksman
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Small Holdings
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