The Yips

Nicola Barker's eight previous novels include DARKMANS (short-listed for the 2007 Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden), WIDE OPEN (winner of the 2000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and CLEAR (long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short-stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in east London.

Praise for 'The Yips': 'Barker is ostensibly a comic writer, and is indeed snort-inducingly funny at times ... What's more - just about uniquely in this country - she is thinking intelligently and critically about how to make [a realist] tradition work in the present day. But it's not for her virtue that she deserves to be read; it's for pleasure.' Keith Miller, Daily Telegraph 'There are moments when Stuart Ransom has the vulgar bravura of John Self in Martin Amis's 'Money' ... but Barker is unique and it's for the pleasures of her style that one reads her.' Kate Kellaway, Observer 'Dementedly imaginative ... stomach-turningly hilarious ... What she has written is a state of the nation novel of the sort Dickens and Hogarth might have jointly conjured up had they ever visited Luton.' Michael Prodger, Financial Times 'Barker is at once sui generis and the Google-age inheritor of a tradition. The first third or so of the book gives us a Chaucerian sketch show sequence of comic set-pieces ... then it takes a left turn into Shakespeare territory' Sam Leith, Guardian 'She is scatological, mischievous, subversive and original. Barker's transfiguration of the commonplace is radically unlike Muriel Spark's, but no less dazzling'. The Times, Ruth Scurr 'Barker captures - and lovingly distorts - both the rhythms and banality of language. She is, as it were, Harold Pinter on crack' Justin Cartwright, The Spectator 'A specialist in likeable British grotesques ... wackier siblings to those in Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black. The Yips cannot be faulted for its free-flowing imagination' Tom Cox, Independent. 'English fiction's great eccentric offers up a typically riotous saga' Guardian '...more consistently surprising than War and Peace, at least.' Sunday Telegraph 'There is nothing conventional about THE YIPS ... its originality, its charm or its peculiar beauty ... yet [it is] is full of straightforward reading pleasures' Sunday Times

Praise for 'Burley Cross Postbox Theft,: 'A vastly satisfying and adventurous novel, a state-of-the-nation comedy from a novelist who can do pretty much anything she likes and is having a great time doing it. This really isn't a book to pass up., Daily Telegraph 'This is the work of a writer in love with language and the ways people employ it to express themselves...nothing short of dazzling.' Observer 'A superb comic novel...the collective, whispery subconscious of a small community is brilliantly suggested through almost imperceptible echoes.' Daily Mail 'Intensely pleasurable. Barker,s sheer energy is irresistible while the intelligence that drives this small comic universe is both spikily awkward and sweetly benign... For inventiveness and verve...no one else comes close., Guardian 'The cacophony of voices is the perfect showcase for Barker,s linguistic games. From love-letters to suicide notes, her language vaults, somersaults and cartwheels across the page... it might just win her a new legion of fans tempted by this funny, heartbreaking book., Sunday Telegraph

Praise for 'The Yips': 'Barker is ostensibly a comic writer, and is indeed snort-inducingly funny at times ... But Barker is neither a classicist nor a modernist: she is working in the realist tradition. What's more - just about uniquely in this country - she is thinking intelligently and critically about how to make that tradition work in the present day. But it's not for her virtue that she deserves to be read; it's for pleasure. Apart from all else, she is very good on love, of both the married and the physical sort, assuming they are two different things - which, of course, the realist tradition tends to assume they are.' Keith Miller, Daily Telegraph

Praise for 'The Yips': 'Barker is ostensibly a comic writer, and is indeed snort-inducingly funny at times ... But Barker is neither a classicist nor a modernist: she is working in the realist tradition. What's more - just about uniquely in this country - she is thinking intelligently and critically about how to make that tradition work in the present day. But it's not for her virtue that she deserves to be read; it's for pleasure. Apart from all else, she is very good on love, of both the married and the physical sort, assuming they are two different things - which, of course, the realist tradition tends to assume they are.' Keith Miller, Daily Telegraph 'There are moments when Stuart Ransom has the vulgar bravura of John Self in martin Amis's Money and occasionally the novel also reminds one of Hilary Mantel - a comparable master of dark comedy. But Barker is unique and it's for the pleasures of her style that one reads her.' Kate Kellaway, Observer '... we are reminded that Barker is a novelist of both epically large and trivially small ... The result is more consistently surprising that War and Peace, at least.' Sunday Telegraph 'There is nothing conventional about THE YIPS ... its originality, its charm or its peculiar beauty. Barker is in many ways a challenging and discomforting writer, yet her work is full of straightforward reading pleasures. She combines serious intentions with lightness of touch, toughness with compassion, and has a unique imagination' Sunday Times