Лучшие книги Николы Баркер

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.

As winner of the highly prestigious IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award, Wide Open beat out books by such masters as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Michael Cunningham. It is truly extraordinary work of fiction, taking readers into a small English seaside town, and into the minds and hearts of its remarkable inhabitants -- a man named Ronny, weed killer by trade, who has some strange things in common with a man he finds dangling from a bridge; Nathan, the son of a pedophile, who toils in the Underground's Lost Property department, endlessly logging missing items; Sara, purveyor of her family boar farm, and Lily, her teenage daughter,…

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'One of the funniest, most finely achieved comic novels, even by her own standard … I think it’s a masterpiece.' ALI SMITH
‘I think Nicola Barker is incapable of a dull page. [Her work] is unified by its spirit of adventure.’ KEVIN BARRY
How long does it take to change the world?
Could it happen in approximately twenty minutes?
Charles, a forty-year-old teddy bear maker, is trying to sell his

The best short stories from perhaps England’s finest young female comic writer.This selection of Nicola Barker’s finest short stories contains work first published in ‘Heading Inland’ and ‘Love Your Enemies’.A sixteen-year-old girl, in ‘Layla’s Nose Job’, is burdened with a grotesque nose. But plastic surgery only serves to demonstrate that her strangeness isn’t just skin-deep. The discovery turns her ingeniously violent. In ‘Inside Information’, Martha, a professional shoplifter, becomes pregnant and attempts to turn her pregnancy to criminal advantage, only to find herself harassed by her foetus, which can not only talk but proves to have grisly plans of its own. In three related pieces (‘Blisters’, ‘Braces’, and ‘Mr. Lippy’) featuring Wesley, a charming but damaged young man, attempts at normality are grimly, inevitably defeated. In ‘The Three Button Trick’, one of Barker’s most naturalistic, a middle-aged woman, who’s been abandoned by her husband, discovers, thanks to the ministrations of several odd acquaintances, how little she needs him and how wayward and liberating true eroticism is.

Two novels from Nicola Barker, published together in a single volume. ‘Small Holdings’: it’s all go in a little oasis of nature, in this stirring tale of subterfuge among the shrubbery – plus ‘Reversed Forecast’, the prize-winning first novel from England’s greatest female comic novelist.‘Small Holdings’ is set in an attractive park in north London. The protagonists are Phil, a chronically shy gardener; Doug, his imposing and unpredictable supervisor; and a malevolent one-legged ex-museum curator called Saleem. 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.‘Reversed Forecast’ is a novel of gambling and allergies, music and dogs, set in some of London’s less scenic locations. Its characters select each other and try or don’t try to make winning combinations. But, as Ruby, this story’s soft-centred heroine, observes: ‘Losing, that’s the whole point of the gamble.’

Imagine a perfect world where everything is known, where everything is open, where there can be no doubt, no hatred, no poverty, no greed. Imagine a System which both nurtures and protects. A Community which nourishes and sustains. An infinite world. A world without sickness, without death. A world without God. A world without fear.

Could you...might you be happy there?

H(A)PPY is a post-post apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland, a story which tells itself and then consumes itself. It's a place where language glows, where words buzz and sparkle and finally implode. It's a novel which twists and writhes with all the terrifying precision of a tiny fish in an Escher lithograph - a book where the mere telling of a story is the end of certainty.

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. Storm-clouds of a different kind are gathering above the bar of Luton's less than exclusive Thistle Hotel.

Longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. A raucous, exuberant novel about the outrageous circus surrounding David Blaine's 2003 starvation stunt at Tower Bridge, from Nicola Barker, a Granta Best of British Novelist. On 5th September 2003, New York illusionist David Blaine entered a small perspex box beside the River Thames and began starving himself. Forty-four days later he left the box. The end. The real show, of course, was on the sidelines: the crowds, the chaos, the hype and most enjoyably, the hypocrisy. Through the eyes and exploits of Adair Graham MacKenney, bitter, shameless and irreverent, we see this world for what it is: a place of illusion, delusion, celebrity and hunger. And, naturally, lust. With her Tupperware and awful shoes, Adair finds himself unaccountably drawn to the reluctant Aphra. But when has futility ever stopped anyone? Just think of the guy in the perspex box. Wickedly comic, caustic and uncommonly astute, this outrageous peep show of a novel gives us our contemporary world laid bare.