An instant classic of teenage self-discovery by prize-winning Nicola Barker, an “anarchic and lovingly perverse writer” (Ali Smith) Summer, 1981. Medve, sixteen years old and six foot three in her crocheted stockings, is marooned in a...
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,...
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 soaps. Some people follow rare...
“Earth and High Heaven” is, simply, a drama of human relationships — of two people in love who are confronted by the obstacle of racial intolerance — presented with such cutting truth, such fidelity to life, such compassion and...
Lush prose and penetrating psychological insight infuse Conrad’s first novel with the qualities that have made him one of the most popular and most studied writers in English literature. The novel chronicles the tragic decline of a Dutch merchant...
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 escapes an unsuitable mother...
In the tradition of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a darkly humorous modern classic of Scottish literature about a doomed adolescent growing up in the mid-20th century — featuring a new introduction by Maggie O’Farrell,...