'Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?'You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract?After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves.As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic masterpiece that traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth.

______ '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 Charles, a forty-year-old boutique teddy bear maker and wearer of ironic t-shirts, is trying – and failing – to sell his small, characterless house in Llandudno. His estate agent Avigail, whose name is definitely not Abigail, is trying – in vain – to rein in Charles’s most unhelpful eccentricities, especially his repeated recounting to prospective buyers of a failed burglary that took place twelve years ago. When Wang Shu and her daughter Ying Yue view the house, Wang Shu is mysteriously struck by a falling oyster shell – the first in a series of seemingly innocuous events distort the reality of the characters’ lives and cause them to question their very existence. As religious epiphanies bump up against declarations of love, the characters begin to sabotage the fictional world they inhabit, causing our entire understanding of the book – and of the boundaries between fiction and real life – to be radically upended. A tour de force that twists the novel into new shapes, I Am Sovereign sees Nicola Barker at her most joyful, provocative and riotous. ______ ' She really is a genius.’ GUARDIAN ‘Life-affirming hilarity – Evelyn Waugh on ecstasy.’ NELL ZINK 'A madly brilliant little book that asks who at any point is in control of what. I loved it.' DAILY MAIL ‘ Nicola Barker’s wildness and capacity for the absurd often delight me.’ SARAH MOSS ‘ What an audacious writer Nicola Barker is … In an era when plot is king, Barker has typically, joyously, dispensed with one … Barker’s pleasure in the novella feels defiant.’ EVENING STANDARD ‘ I Am Sovereign is bursting with energy, compassion and humour.’ LITERARY REVIEW ‘ Barker is a writer in a class of her own … A work of coruscating intelligence, of deep humanity.’ OBSERVER ‘ A riotous burst of a novel that scrutinises the nature of fiction with the lightest of touches.’ MAIL ON SUNDAY ‘ A bracing, brilliantly bonkers comic novel … This is freewheeling fiction that delights in the visual.’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘ Barker’s writing is very, very funny, both ha ha and strange ... Fans of Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet” will enjoy a similarly arch, detached view on the banality of contemporary Britain ... A gloriously audacious blend of, well, the deep and the trite.’ INDEPENDENT

Nicola Barker weaves humor and tragedy through this fresh and original collection, as her characters struggle to find love, independence, and fulfillment in this new addition to the Ecco Art of the Story seriesNicola Barker's collection of her nineteen most brilliant stories exemplifies her ability to create daring, witty, and dynamic characters, all their idiosyncracies intact. Barker's stories often use wordplay and humor to stretch the boundaries of metaphor and reality as the outrageously original plots unfold. Through her confident and clever style, these short stories sling Barker to the forefront of fiction writing, as she is reminiscent of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Margaret Atwood.The collection begins with a smart tale of a teenage girl whose obsession with the size of her nose dangerously compromises her relationships with her friends and her family. "Inside Information" is a pun of a title, describing how the protagonist's unborn...

This 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, tragically born with unformed organs and blood that refuses to clot.· · · Starkly original and at turns hilarious, sad, and hopeful, ‘Wide Open’ brilliantly displays Nicola Barker’s delightfully singular literary talent.

From Man Booker-shortlisted, IMPAC Award-winning author Nicola Barker comes an exuberant, multi-voiced new novel mapping the extraordinary life and legacy of a 19th-century Hindu saintTo the world, he is Sri Ramakrishna—godly avatar, esteemed spiritual master, beloved guru. To Rani Rashmoni, she of low caste and large inheritance, he is the brahmin fated to defy tradition. But to Hriday, his nephew and longtime caretaker, he is just Uncle—maddening, bewildering Uncle, prone to entering trances at the most inconvenient of times, known to sneak out to the forest at midnight to perform dangerous acts of self-effacement, who must be vigilantly safeguarded not only against jealous enemies and devotees with ulterior motives, but also against that most treasured yet insidious of sulfur-rich vegetables: the cauliflower. Rather than puzzling the shards of history and legend together, Barker shatters the mirror again and rearranges the pieces. The result...

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017*A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEARFrom the internationally acclaimed, Man Booker-shortlisted Nicola Barker comes a new novel, a post-post apocalyptic story that overflows with pure creative talent.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...

Nicola Barker, Man Booker Prize–shortlisted author of Darkmans and The Yips and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Hawthornden Prize, gathers her finest short fiction in this irresistible collectionAudacious, original, clever, poignant—these are just a few words that describe the writing of Nicola Barker, an award-winning author who has been compared to Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Margaret Atwood. Now nineteen of her finest short stories have been compiled into one startling, delightfully readable volume.It takes young Carrie twenty-one years and a chance meeting with an eighty-three-year-old widow to realize she fell victim to her husband's "three button trick." The main character in "Wesley" must work through his troubled childhood in a series of episodes involving masses of eels, an imaginary friend named Joy, and an unmentionable incident with an emu-owl. Whether describing erotic encounters behind clothing racks or a kleptomaniac with his...