The Three Button Trick: Selected stories
The best short stories from perhaps Englands finest young female comic writer.This selection of Nicola Barkers finest short stories contains work first published in Heading Inland and Love Your Enemies.A sixteenyearold girl, in Laylas Nose Job, is burdened with a grotesque nose. But plastic surgery
Reversed Forecast / Small Holdings
Two novels from Nicola Barker, published together in a single volume. Small Holdings: its all go in a little oasis of nature, in this stirring tale of subterfuge among the shrubbery plus Reversed Forecast, the...
In the Approaches
Nicola Barkers readers are primed to expect surprises, but her tenth novel delivers mindmeld on a metaphysical scale. From quiet beginnings in the picturesque English seaside enclave of Pett Level, In The Approaches...
Behindlings
The breakthrough novel from one of the greatest comic writers in the language one of the twenty selected by Granta as the Best of Young British Writers 2003. Some people follow the stars. Some people follow the...
Wide Open
Winner of IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2000, Wide Open is the first of Nicola Barker's Thames Gateway novels. Poking out of the River Thames estuary, the strange Isle of Sheppey is home to a nudist beach, a nature...
Darkmans
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on us all If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly...
Five Miles from Outer Hope
Summer, 1981. Medve, sixteen years old and six foot three in her crocheted stockings, is marooned in a semiderelict hotel on a tiny island off the coast of Devon. Theres nothing to do but paint novelty Thatcher mugs,...
Small Holdings
Hilarious, poignant and frequently surreal, Small Holdings is a is a comedy of errors from a neglected corner of everyday life by the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker. An attractive park in Palmers Green plays...
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. Fortyfour 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 Yips
2006 is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Tiger Woods' reputation is entirely untarnished and the English Defence League does not exist yet. Stormclouds of a different kind are gathering above the bar of Luton's less than exclusive Thistle Hotel.
Burley Cross Postbox Theft
From the awardwinning author of Darkmans comes a comic epistolary novel of startling originality and wit. Reading other peoples letters is always a guilty pleasure. But for two West Yorkshire policemen contemplating...
Heading Inland
Heading Inland is a funny, broody, saucy collection of stories about the kind of people you sometimes meet but might prefer to ignore. Barker creates a wonderfully fantastical and unimaginable world: an unborn baby...
Reversed Forecast
The first novel by the acclaimed, brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker, prizewinning author of Reversed Forecast Dazzling, gritty, and surprising, is the uniquely entertaining first novel by Nicola Barker,...
Love Your Enemies
From the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker, 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 plussize nose.