First published in 1987, "The Gooseboy" is a tale that is both elegant and grotesque, funny and appalling. Doug and Dulcie Bysshe are twins. Doug - or Bysshe - is now a successful film star living in the south of France and contemplating a new part as a saintly doctor in an African leper colony. Dulcie, busy and energetic, is fighting to retrieve her husband, the mournful and ineffective Pike, who has absconded to Nice with the adolescent Cherrimay Pugh. At the centre of events, is the Gooseboy, a creature with a double face, half faun, half deformed horror..."The Gooseboy" questions the relations between flesh and spirit, the ridiculous and the terrible. A. L. Barker watches shrewdly and judges from a distance, her pithy and particular prose shining through. 'She writes with a precision and an economy of words which had me gasping' - Auberon Waugh.

The gooseboy: A novel

A.L. Barker

Hutchinson

Elements of Doubt : Ghost Stories

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Vintage

The Gooseboy

Contemporary

Arena Books

No word of love

Short Stories & Anthologies

Chatto&Windus

John Brown's body,

Hogarth Press

A heavy feather

The Hogarth Press, London

A.L. Barker dissects the unnerving emotions of everyday life with the sly humour and exquisite feel for language that prompted Auberon Waugh to declare that she 'writes like an angel and I love her'.In this, her tenth collection of stories, she unfolds tales of cunning, fancy, and shifting alliances. Here a young boy fosters grand illusions; a wife faces broken promises; a dutiful committee woman meets a sparky old gentleman; a witch is drowned; an intruder insinuates himself into a lonely woman's holiday; and commonplace superstition mingles effortlessly with submerged desire.

Submerged

Humor & Satire

Time Warner Books Uk

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Books by A.L. Barker