Behindlings [Paperback]

Barker's Canvey (once dubbed "Candy Island" by Daniel Defoe) is, with its Wimpy Bar, dreary pubs and long-cherished grudges, rumours and secrets, a quintessentially English small town. Its emotionally damaged population is augmented by the "Behindlings" of the title, a gaggle of oddballs who follow, or more precisely obsessively stalk, the novel's enigmatic central character, Wesley. The architect of a chocolate company-funded treasure hunt, author of a pseudo-Nietzschean walking guide and the man behind the daring theft of an antique pond, he is a rather malevolent Pied Piper. Part Alvin Toffler-quoting, peripatetic environmental visionary, part immoral (and maybe downright evil) fraudster; he's also notorious for feeding the fingers on his right hand to an eagle owl "in an act of penance" for accidentally killing his brother.

Would-be-prizewinners and cranks are not the only ones drawn into his orbit. Josephine Bean, a local nurse and environmental campaigner; Katherine Turpin, a lascivious beansprout farmer maligned in his walking book; Arthur Young, a former employee of the treasure hunt's sponsors and Ted, the island's estate agent and closet seamstress, all seem to have a few reasons of their own for keeping an eye on Wesley.

Barker has always had a penchant for the surreal, and occasionally here both plot and characterisation can get swamped in flights of absurdist imagination. She is perhaps, too fond of the elaborate simile. The clackety, clackety of the "like a" and "as a" of her prose style is, from time to time, a little exasperating. Despite this, her narrative is so alluringly, so charmingly odd, bristling with puzzles and etymological games and full of wonderfully, devilishly comic touches, that it's easy to ignore its minor flaws. --Travis Elborough

'Marvellously inventive, a cornucopia of cornucopias all the way to its brilliant non-ending – its refusal to end. It is a new kind of book, and an intense kind of joy.' Ali Smith, TLS

'Compelling. Barker's narrative draws us in with the disturbing, surreal touch of a latter-day Lewis Carroll.' Michelene Wandor, Sunday Times

'Dazzling… She celebrates the complexity of human experience.' Frank Egerton, The Times

'Insanely inventive. Her vision of a marginal Britain populated by drifters and desperados is fired by a comic energy that dances on the edge of self-combustion.' Alex Clark, Guardian

'Fucked up, fucked off and totally, weirdly brilliant.' Eithne Farry, Elle

'Extraordinary. Full of deadpan wit, black comedy and visual slapstick., the novel delights most through its imaginative extravagances.' Katie Owen, Sunday Telegraph

'An intriguing satire on the nature of celebrity and the current confused state of our culture. Playful, dark, comic and cruel.' Kath Murphy, Scotland on Sunday

'Behindlings is an exquisite diversion and, more importantly, a true original.' Arena

'She is an excellent writer… Her vision is unique, funny, dark, cute, sarcastic and clever. She doesn't flinch from describing sadism, violence or ugliness, but never does so without warmth or sympathy… ‘ Alain de Botton, Literary Review

‘(A) witty, demotic and unique talent… Her method that of a diligent scavenger with a clever eye for something funny, precious or sad among the bric-a-brac. Barker is at her very best when writing sinister fairy tales – she revels in the resilient oddness of the English sensibility, its lack of sophistication, its unconventionality, its peculiar cadences and little-noticed sense of the surreal.’ The Times

‘Nothing is too weird or too ordinary for Nicola Barker.' Guardian

'Barker has carved a niche for herself; a niche perhaps shared only with Magnus Mills. She writes of the comic and sometimes sinister surrealism of ordinary people's lives, and the results are books to make you wince, gasp and laugh at loud.' Independent on Sunday