Paperback. Pub Date :2011-10-27 Pages: 544 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK A brilliantly funny novel from one of our most unconventional literary talents. Nicola Barker.Some people follow the stars.Some people follow the soaps.Some people follow rare birds. or obscure bands. or the form. or the football.Wesley prefers not to follow.He thinks that to follow anything too assiduously is a sign of weakness.Wesley is a prankster. a maverick. a charismatic manipulator. an accidental murderer who longs to live his life anonymously.But he cant.It is his awful destiny to be hotly pursued - secretly stalked. obsessively hunted - by a disparate group of oddballs he calls The Behindlings.Their motivations Love. boredom. hatred. revenge.

Behindlings

Literature & Fiction

Barker, Nicola

Humor & Satire

Fourth Estate

Longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. A raucous, novel about the circus surrounding David Blaine's starvation stunt at Tower Bridge, from a Granta Best of British Novelist.On 5th September 2003, New York Illusionist David Blaine entered a small perspex box adjacent to the River Thames and commenced starving himself. Forty-four days later - on 19th October - he left the box, four stone lighter. That much, at least, is clear.And the rest? The crowds? The chaos? The hype? The rage? The rows? The lust? The filth? The bullshit? The hypocrisy?Nicola Barker fearlessly crams all that and more into this ribald and outrageous peep show of a novel, her most irreverent, caustic, up-to-the-minute work yet, laying bare the heart of our contemporary world, a world of illusion, delusion, celebrity and hunger.

Clear

Literary

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Darkmans 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 might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive - for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin's biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of - uh - salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier? Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford [a ridiculously modern town], about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It's also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark - quite unspeakable - into its ear. The third of Nicola Barker's narratives of the Thames Gateway, Darkmans is an epic novel of startling originality.

Darkmans

DARKMANS PB

Fourth Estate Ltd.

Three Button Trick: Selected Stories

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 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.

Love Your Enemies

Small Holdings

HARPER/COLLINS

The hilarious Man Booker-longlisted novel from the author of `Darkmans', Nicola Barker.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. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a man who's had cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interfering barmaid with three E's at A-level but a PhD in bullshit, a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more pious wife. But at the heart of every intrigue and the bottom of every mystery is the repugnantly charismatic Stuart Ransom - a golfer in free-fall.Nicola Barker's Man Booker-longlisted novel `The Yips' at once a historical novel of the pre-Twitter moment, the filthiest state-of-the-nation novel since Martin Amis's `Money' and the most flamboyant piece of comic fiction ever to be set in Luton.

The Yips. by Nicola Barker

The hilarious Man Booker-longlisted novel from the author of ‘Darkmans’ and ‘The Burley Cross Postbox Theft’.
2006 is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Tiger Woods' reputation is entirely untarnished and the English Defence League does not exist. But storm-clouds are gathering above the bar of the less-than-exclusive Thistle Hotel in Luton.
Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a man who's survived cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interfering barmaid with three E's at A-level but a PhD in bullshit, a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more pious wife.
But at the heart of every intrigue and the bottom of every mystery is the repugnantly charismatic Stuart Ransom – a golf star in free-fall.

The Yips

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

‘Open yourself up again to all that terrible light and savage bliss and deafening reverberation …’
In the Summer of 1971, a charismatic family seeks refuge in the quiet, English coastal backwater of Pett Level. Bran Cleary is a controversial Irish muralist; his fractious and promiscuous wife (and muse) 'Lonely' Allaway is half Aboriginal; their strange, sickly daughter, Orla Nor, is almost a Saint.
Thirteen years later, a shifty individual turns up in Pett Level, apparently determined to get to the bottom of the bizarre and ultimately tragic events which unfolded in the aftermath of that arrival. But does he really want to understand, or is he just way too close to the story to make any clear sense of it? And what of the locals who seem so determined to resist and undermine his investigations?
‘In The Approaches’ is a fabulously twisted comedy of very bad manners which starts out as a seaside idyll and ends up as a pilgrimage – sometimes sacred, sometimes profane, and frequently both at once. Set in a 1984 which seems almost as distantly located in the past as Orwell’s was in the future, Nicola Barker’s tenth novel offers a captivating glimpse of something more shocking than any dystopia – the possibility of faith.

In the Approaches

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Books by Barker, Nicola