Nicola Barker - Behindlings

Scotsman

‘Fucked up, fucked off and totally, weirdly brilliant.’

EITHNE FARRY, Elle

‘ Behindlings has an almost dream-like quality, as it tells the tale of a crusty Pied Piper figure who, by some indefinable magnetism, has acquired a cult following in deepest, dullest Essex. People are obsessed with Wesley — they are, in his words, his “behindlings”. They make Canvey into a literary Royston Vasey, a portrait of small-town torpor that’s so acutely observed it becomes surreal. An exquisite diversion and, more importantly, a true original.’

Arena

‘ Behindlings is a magnificent novel and arguably Barker’s best to date.’

The List

‘Barker’s narrative draws us in with the disturbing, surreal touch of a latter-day Lewis Carroll without a hint of literary cloning, generating her own distinctive voice. The stark Essex landscape, chillingly described, is host to grim and displaced lives. Unexpiated actions of emotional betrayal hint at more serious matters of morality and conscience under Barker’s fearless imagination. At the end, of course, winner cannot take all, for there are no winners in this compelling novel.’

Sunday Times

‘She’s wayward, and uninterested in what conventionally passes for publishable work. There’s a lurid but skeletal quality to her writing — as if you get something deep in the feeling, and something decorative in the writing, and an unnerving space between. This is a kind of perfectly English work of art. It has a slinky, teasing exactness in the writing.’

Telegraph

‘Always a visceral writer, never one to be restrained by decorum, taste or euphony, here she explores power, hunger and attraction ever more sharply.’

Independent on Sunday

‘Demotic, chancy prose, which bubbles with cranky metaphors and enjoyably perverse ideas. Barker has created a unique world — vivid, stylish and bracing.’

Financial Times

‘Barker’s Canvey Island represents a world at once familiar and bizarre — a bleak huddle of takeaways and dreary days, bungalows with chipped paint and fading furnishings in a contemporary landscape that aches with grim nostalgia; retro-land without the glamour of irony perhaps. This is an intriguing satire on the nature of celebrity and the current confused state of our culture. Playful, dark, comic and cruel.’

Scotland on Sunday

‘Wonderfully surreal. Barker’s seemingly limitless imagination keeps you guessing until the end of this highly original read.’

Red

With special thanks to Mr Alvin Toffler for his widely celebrated genius, to Mr Vic Chesnutt for his unabashed lyricism, and to Bill Menniss (proprietor of the incomparable Landgate Books, Rye), for laughing so mercilessly at my origami.