ABSTRACT
One critic has described Nicola Barker as having 'a determinedly perverse and ungovernable imagination', and certainly her novels and stories, and the characters that inhabit them, have an unmistakable weirdness and quirkiness that are all her own. Nicola Barker was born in 1966 in Ely, Cambridgeshire. She spent five years of her childhood in South Africa, returning as a teenager to Home Counties Britain with her mother after her parents split up. Barker self-consciously peoples the novel with bizarre misfits and weird losers but she invests them with a warmth and a vulnerability that push them out of the straitjacket of caricature and grotesquerie in which, initially, they seem trapped. After another prize-winning collection of short stories, Barker then published what is both her strangest and finest novel to date, Wide Open.
