The Three Button Trick: Selected Stories (Paperback)

'She is an excellent writer - unique, funny, dark, cute, sarcastic and clever. Her language is unfussy, direct, at times colloquial and then, just when it is needed to produce the right emotional counterpoint, elegant and formal. She doesn't flinch from describing sadism, violence or ugliness, but never does so without warmth or sympathy... What could have been heavy-handed in another writer's hands is transformed into something light, enchanting, moving. Highly recommended.' Alain de Botton, Literary Review 'A witty, unique talent. She is a diligent scavenger with a clever eye for something funny, precious or sad. There is a magpie quality to her writing, the half-mawkish obsessiveness of a junk collector on whose stall one might glimpse something familiar, but not forgotten. Barker is at her best when writing sinister fairy tales and 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.' Rachel Cusk, The Times 'The writing is sharp, intricate and stylish. The settings are unusually imaginative and original... each story presents its own particular and perfectly realised world, one in which very specific events and feelings take place... nothing is too weird or too ordinary for Nicola Barker.' Susie Boyt, Guardian

Prize-winning author and Granta-selected Best of Young British Novelists 2003 writer Nicola Barker returns with The Three Button Trick, a collection of short stories culled from two of her previous collections, Love Your Enemies and Heading Inland. Barker has long been praised as one of the country's best writers for her surreal stories and entertainingly cruel plots. Each story features fairly normal characters and situations with dark, comic plot twists. The best stories feature Barker's imagination at its most inventive, be it the story of the pregnant kleptomaniac whose understandably disagreeable foetus, when denied appeals for a different parent, escapes the womb, or the fat girlfriend who, while on a break from her boyfriend, reveals that the secret to her weight loss is a tapeworm. The less interesting stories are the ones based on more mundane situations based on middle-aged middle-class female catastrophe: the bride with the stain on her dress, the uptight schoolteacher dared to use a discreet sex toy in her classroom, or the John Lewis employee who has sex with a customer. Despite her strong voice and ear for dialogue, Barker's strength is her surprisingly freakish endings and Gothic surrealism. She recounts tales of the alienated in a direct, no-nonsense way that makes readers trust her, even when they should know better. This slim collection is an excellent introduction to Barker's wickedly sinister world. (Kirkus UK)

The best short stories from perhaps England's finest young female comic writer. 'If her prose style wasn't so devastatingly funny and totally original she might be someone it's fun to hate. As it is, reading her short stories makes you wish you had a best friend just like her...No-one else in England writes like this.' Tatler This selection of Nicola Barker's finest short stories contains work first published in Heading Inland and Love Your Enemies 'Terse, droll, and unsettling tales from a highly idiosyncratic young writer. They share with her novels a conviction that life is stranger than we imagine and perhaps stranger than we can imagine and that only those willing to pursue extreme behavior of one sort or another (or incapable of doing otherwise) are likely to glimpse the true, deeply weird parameters of existence. A 16-year-old girl, in 'Layla's Nose Job', is burdened with a grotesque nose. But plastic surgery only serves to demonstrate that her strangeness isn't just skin-deep. The discovery turns her ingeniously violent. In 'Inside Information', Martha, a professional shoplifter, becomes pregnant and attempts to turn her pregnancy to criminal advantage, only to find herself harassed by her foetus, which not only can talk but proves to have grisly plans of its own. It's impossible, many of these stories argue, for outsiders to escape their alienation. In three related pieces ('Blisters', 'Braces', and 'Mr. Lippy') featuring Wesley, a charming but damaged young man, attempts at normality are grimly, inevitably defeated. In 'The Three Button Trick', one of Barker's most naturalistic, a middle-aged woman, who's been abandoned by her husband, discovers, thanks to the ministrations of several odd acquaintances, how little she needs him and how wayward and liberating true eroticism is. Those with a taste for odd, haunting characters, unsettling incidents, and a deadpan, savage sense of humor, will likely find these stories uniquely stirring.' Kirkus Reviews