Product Description: 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 nineteenth-century Hindu saint.To the world, he is Sri Ramakrishna--godly avatar, esteemed spiritual master, beloved guru...read more

Product Description: The Cauliflower® is quite possibly Nicola Barker’s best work yet. Set for the most part in nineteenth-century Calcutta, it chronicles the life of ‘Uncle’, a spiritual leader and guru. Structured in short vignettes that skip backwards and forwards in time, it mixes Hindu parables and myth with descriptions of the often brutal and archaic traditions of the region at the time (and a fair number of haikus) to create a vivid and vital portrait of the birth of modern India...read more

Product Description: To 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...read more

Product Description: The Civil Partnership Act 2004 and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 are important legal, social and historical landmarks, rich in symbolic, material and cultural meanings. While fiercely opposed by many, within mainstream narratives they are often represented as a victory in a legal reform process that commenced with the decriminalisation of homosexuality...read more

Product Description: A comprehensive exploration of current same-sex marriage debates in Australia, Canada, South Africa, the UK and the US, providing a critical analysis of the institution of marriage asking whether and how feminist critiques might apply to same-sex marriage and combining theories of second wave feminism with insights from contemporary queer theory...read more

The hilarious Man Booker-longlisted novel from the author of 'Darkmans', Nicola Barker. 2006 is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Tiger Woods' reputation is entirely untarnished and the English Defence League does not exist yet. Stormclouds of a different kind are gathering above the bar of Luton's less than exclusive Thistle Hotel. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a man who's had cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interfering barmaid with three E's at A-level but a PhD in bullshit, a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more pious wife. But at the heart of every intrigue and the bottom of every mystery is the repugnantly charismatic Stuart Ransom - a golfer in free-fall. Nicola Barker's Man Booker-longlisted novel 'The Yips' at once a historical novel of the pre-Twitter moment, the filthiest state-of-the-nation novel since Martin Amis's 'Money' and the most flamboyant piece of comic fiction ever to be set in Luton.

Product Description: In the summer of 1981, a six-foot-three giantess named Medve, built like a shire horse, is residing with her abnormally short family in an almost derelict art deco hotel on an island off the South Devon coast. Then a ginger stranger arrives, stinking of antiseptic.

Product Description: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Darkmans is an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on us all... If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive - for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin's biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of - uh - salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier?Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford [a ridiculously modern town], about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy...read more

The author of Wide Open presents the story of Wesley, whose kinetic energy, nasty wit, and kindness to animals makes him a star in the eyes of those who nip at his heels, lie in wait for him, and otherwise enmesh themselves in twisted plots. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

This novel is about the outrageous circus surrounding David Blaine's 2003 starvation stunt at Tower Bridge, from Nicola Barker, a Granta Best of British Novelist.

An early novella by the nineteenth-century English author tells a tale of love, jealousy, rivalry, and thwarted ambition.

Product Description: The Dialogue of the Dogs is an inspired work of psychological observation by the master of the picaresque novel. In it, Cervantes displays all the clarity and warmth that marks the rich prose of Don Quixote. Given the gift of speech for a day, two dogs set about satirizing humans, their supposed superiors...read more

The author of Wide Open presents the story of Wesley, whose kinetic energy, nasty wit, and kindness to animals makes him a star in the eyes of those who nip at his heels, lie in wait for him, and otherwise enmesh themselves in twisted plots.

A Londoner who makes a living spraying pesticides and his eccentric relatives and neighbors, including the son of a pedophile and the female head of a boar farm, follow their unglamorous, bitterly comic destinies in the English suburbs. Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2000. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

A collection of nineteen short stories from the author of Love Your Enemies and Heading Inland explores the fates of characters whose erotic fantasies, childhood traumas, and seemingly harmless deceptions wreak havoc in their lives. Reprint. 20,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: A collection of ten stories about people trying to find beauty in adverse circumstances. The first is Layla Carter, 16, from North London, whose nose is too big. The last is a lonely woman who meets a satyr in her kitchen and asks: Can I feel your fur?.