Small Holdings (14 page)

Praise

NICOLA BARKER’S
eight novels include
Darkmans
(short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden prize), and
Wide Open
(winner of the 2000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). 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.

From the reviews of
Small Holdings
:

‘This marvellous short novel explodes into action, with Barker letting off fireworks and flares in all directions, performing dazzling verbal gymnastics. She has a great talent for the creation of eccentric characters, and the assorted misfits in
Small Holdings
fizz with playfulness and the author’s obvious delight at her own powers of invention. A hilarious and remarkably assured novel’

ALEX CLARK
,
TLS

‘Funny and intelligent. Barker’s sense of plot and comic timing is faultless: she goes for big effects, which resound brilliantly within the small space her narrative describes, and holds the whole thing together with writing that is resolved down to the last detail.
Small Holdings
paints the big picture on a small canvas, cap -turing in it the universality that is the essence of good writing’

RACHEL CUSK
,
The Times

‘Edgy and comic, it succeeds by virtue of Barker’s flamboyant sense of the absurd’

Elle
magazine

By the Same Author

Love Your Enemies

Reversed Forecast

Heading Inland

Wide Open

Five Miles from Outer Hope

Behindlings

Clear

Darkmans

Burley Cross Postbox Theft

Three Button Trick

Copyright © Nicola Barker 1995

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Nicola Barker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-00-743604-0

EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007435913