A guide to speculative fiction

Reading lists

I Am Sovereign

A bold and hilarious hand grenade of a book that twists the novel into new shapes as the characters seemingly sabotage the fictional world they inhabit, I Am Sovereign sees Nicola Barker at her most joyful, provocative and riotous; it is the work of a novelist at the height of her powers.

One of the funniest, most finely achieved comic novels, even by her own standard … I think it’s a masterpiece.

Life-affirming hilarity – Evelyn Waugh on ecstasy.

Nicola Barker’s wildness and capacity for the absurd often delight me.

Nicola Barker always makes me laugh, and her new one, I Am Sovereign, is one of her funniest yet, which is saying something. Of course the best comic stuff always has a dark, dark undertow, and so it is with Ms Barker.

Nicola Barker loves to break the conventions of fiction ... She has set herself the novelist’s ultimate challenge - to turn the dullest situation imaginable into something fascinating and lifelike – and she (mostly) pulls it off ... Barker conveys the essence of these people with such skill that you feel you have met them.

A bracing, brilliantly bonkers comic novel … This is freewheeling fiction that delights in the visual.

Nicola Barker is British fiction’s brightest outlier ... a madly brilliant little book ... I loved it.

What an audacious writer Nicola Barker is ... In an era when plot is king, Barker has typically, joyously, dispensed with one ... Barker’s pleasure in the novella feels defiant.

Nicola Barker is literary royalty ... Brave, funny and painfully timely.

A riotous burst of a novel that scrutinises the nature of fiction with the lightest of touches.

The novel’s 200 pages detail the protagonists’ twining internal existences over the course of a farcical 20-minute house-viewing during which they feel they might each have come to experience some form of self-knowledge, or higher knowledge … There aren’t many British writers who have Barker’s sort of courage – to get started on ideas that might appear like trifles, handle them seriously, and produce works that are as close as literature gets to pure play.

I Am Sovereign is bursting with energy, compassion and humour.

Barker is a writer in a class of her own ... A work of coruscating intelligence, of deep humanity.

Barker’s writing is very, very  funny, both ha ha and strange ... Fans of Ali Smith’s 'Seasonal Quartet' will enjoy a similarly arch, detached view on the banality of contemporary Britain ... A gloriously audacious blend of, well, the deep and the trite.

Nicola Barker has repeatedly challenged convention. And she is not stopping now.

Ingenious ... Barker spins a series of variations on the theme of selfhood ... Barker serves up a mixture of experiment and statement, part postmodern comedy, part spiritual credo. It takes as it’s raw material the fear and panic, anxiety and suspicion, depression and despair experienced by a man who wants to sell his house, an estate agent trying to help him sell it, the child of the prospective buyer, and, via moments of authorial intrusion and a brilliant confessional finale, the novelist responsible for creating them. The book exhibits Barker’s gifts as a psychologist ... I Am Sovereign places this agonised trio within an elaborate conceptual framework ... Barker isn’t the first writer to use postmodern devices to explore questions about selfhood, but she diverges from most of her predecessors in rejecting the analogy of the self as “fiction” ... [I Am Sovereign] renders the next stage in this remarkable writer’s journey a more than usually enticing prospect.

The novel is not dead when we have writers as curious, daring and honest as Nicola Barker. Her latest is downright exquisite.

A madly brilliant little book … I loved it.

It marks a cautious pivot away from the involutions of H(A)PPY and The Cauliflower, back towards the highly distinctive take on literary realism that characterizes Barker’s earlier work.

Gobbled all of this down all of this 209 page gem on a single long-haul flight. Set in a single 20-minute house viewing in Llandudno with a bafflingly diverse cast of characters. It shouldn’t work but I thought it was super.

Rick O’Shea’s Best Books of 2019 in RTE.ie

Knocked me sideways … It’s so masterful and meta. The narrative style is elegant and frenetic

Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018.

__________________________________________ 
'One of the funniest, most finely achieved comic novels, even by her own standard … I think it’s a masterpiece.' ALI SMITH 
 
‘I think Nicola Barker is incapable of a dull page. [Her work] is unified by its spirit of adventure.’ KEVIN BARRY 
 
How long does it take to change the world? 
Could it happen in approximately twenty minutes? 
 
Charles, a forty-year-old teddy bear maker, is trying to sell his late mother's house, helped by his estate agent Avigail (who thinks Charles is an imbecile). The prospective buyers: the fearsome Wang Shu - who has no desire to make idle chit-chat - and her downtrodden daughter, Ying Yue. 
 
During the twenty-minute viewing a huge number of things happen, although it is also entirely possible that nothing happens at all. Which is it? Can the world really turn on its axis during a mundane discussion about cheese preservation? Has fiction the power to do that? Should it even want to? 
__________________________________________ 
'She really is a genius.’ GUARDIAN 
 
‘Life-affirming hilarity – Evelyn Waugh on ecstasy.’ NELL ZINK 
 
'A madly brilliant little book that asks who at any point is in control of what. I loved it.' DAILY MAIL 
 
‘Nicola Barker’s wildness and capacity for the absurd often delight me.’ SARAH MOSS 
 
‘What an audacious writer Nicola Barker is … In an era when plot is king, Barker has typically, joyously, dispensed with one … Barker’s pleasure in the novella feels defiant.’ EVENING STANDARD 
 
‘I Am Sovereign is bursting with energy, compassion and humour.’ LITERARY REVIEW 
 
‘Barker is a writer in a class of her own … A work of coruscating intelligence, of deep humanity.’ OBSERVER 
 
‘A riotous burst of a novel that scrutinises the nature of fiction with the lightest of touches.’ MAIL ON SUNDAY 
 
‘A bracing, brilliantly bonkers comic novel … This is freewheeling fiction that delights in the visual.’ SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘Barker’s writing is very, very funny, both ha ha and strange ... Fans of Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet” will enjoy a similarly arch, detached view on the banality of contemporary Britain ... A gloriously audacious blend of, well, the deep and the trite.’ INDEPENDENT

H(A)PPY

From the internationally acclaimed, Man Booker-shortlisted Nicola Barker comes a new novel, a post-post apocalyptic story that overflows with pure creative talent.

Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY is a work of vaulting ambition. It is deathly serious but played out with the lightest of touches. She takes the vapid discourse of social media blather, with all its ‘likes’ and ‘favourites’, and extrapolates madly to make a language for an utterly believable future world, a world enslaved by the blandness of its technology. Line by line, the novel carefully builds its music and teases out its crazed riffs. It’s very funny but there are pockets of great eeriness, and of savagery even. It’s a novel-as-object, too, with a typography employed as visual code, but its design always has a narrative purpose. Only a writer of uncanny ability could bring this novel to such memorable, pulsing life. It’s very moving.

H(A)PPY is anything but conventional, subverting the traditions of sci-fi, typography and narrative … The coloured words are joined by a host of typographical flourishes, making the book a bravura piece of design … Barker is as gnomic, terrifying and glorious as ever.

Nicola Barker’s kaleidoscopic new novel is a socio-political futurama with a wildness and honesty all of its own … What wonders there are in Nicola Barker’s bewildering, fatiguing and deliciously stimulating new novel … Echoing and quoting literary styles and situations, disrupting the words on the page – via those coloured inks, blank pages, typographical games – in a manner that traces a line from Laurence Sterne to avant-gardists such as BS Johnson, Deborah Levy and Tom McCarthy … But H(a)ppy ventures far beyond a retread of narratological theory … Any description of H(a)ppy can only fail to do justice to its wildness and its honesty. It is a superb novel by a genuinely experimental and committed novelist. In Barker’s hand, narrative, however fragile, not only survives but thrives.

(Barker) specialises in formal eccentricity, thematic novelty, stylistic excess ... Her new book is her strangest yet, an avant-garde slice of dystopian science fiction that thumbs its nose...at the conventions of the genre ... It is a small miracle that this uncompromising anti-novel about the collapse of narrative absolutely works ... Barker is as innovative and idiosyncratic as ever.

No book Nicola Barker writes is remotely like a book by anyone else, which is one of the many reasons to celebrate her. Also, no two books by Nicola Barker are doing remotely the same thing, which is another. So you never quite know what you’re in for. And H(A)PPY, even by her own extravagant standards, is very strange indeed … Barker has always been a visionary writer – visionary in style, with past and present interpenetrating in dream and hallucination. But her interest in religious visions and theology here comes to the fore … As I say, Barker is not remotely like any other writer. With its typographical jiggering about (words really do change colour, and some pages have blocks of identical text or no text at all), and its favouring of symbols and ideas over characters, setting and story, it’s more like a poem or artwork than a novel. Still, it’s quite something. I’m just not sure what.

With polychromatic printing, creative typography and sheer inspiration, the post-apocalyptic novel has been turned on its head … In most fiction set in totalitarian states, the principal protagonist will gradually realise the monstrosity of the regime…Nicola Barker, one of our greatest contemporary novelists, with typical élan, turns this paradigm inside out … This must be the most beautifully designed book I have read since Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves … As the novel progresses, Barker pulls off an astonishing piece of technique … She is the most unpredictable novelist I know.

The English novelist Nicola Barker began publishing in the mid-1990s, hit her stride almost immediately … Barker seems to find writing fiction as natural as breathing, and there’s a strong imaginative streak to almost everything she does … The Prospero role is here assumed by Barker herself, and the parallel is fairly close: creative to excess, more than capable of abusing her omnipotence, blurring the border between genius and dazzle.

A trailblazing sci-fi writer makes a bleak future seem fun ... Nicola Barker is the high priestess of weird ... H(A)PPY is the story of one woman's escape from a controlling matrix formed by a powerful artificial intelligence ... As Mira's journey of emancipation progresses, a full-on typographic melodrama explodes off the page ... It's confusing but fun. Barker, along with David Mitchell and Dave Eggers, is an important trailblazer for literary sci-if. H(A)PPY does not present a cheerful version of the future of humanity, but in her hands it is a hauntingly convincing one.

As ever, Barker spins her ingredients into a wild, antic performance with a tuning – comic, satirical, mystical, downright weird – all her own … Not only the ideas but the very words on the page spiral, loop, morph and shatter. Barker’s expressive typography enacts the breakdowns, and breakthroughs, of Mira’s mutiny: not some avant-garde stunt, but the method of George Herbert’s “pattern poems”, or of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy … She succeeds in tuning the dystopian genre to a fresh, uncanny pitch.

H(A)PPY is Barker’s most audacious and important novel since Darkmans … A clever exploration of the compulsive and destructive power of narrative … Language, grammar and typography spiral out of control until they reach the crescendo of a typographical cathedral composed of a “billion tiny calculations” … Barker has always been a wildly experimental writer and never more so than now … [H(A)PPY] demonstrates her visceral sensitivity to words.

Each of Nicola Barker’s books is a world unto itself; with H(A)PPY, winner of the Goldsmiths prize, she pushed the novel towards objet d’art, using colour and madcap typography to conjure a visionary dystopia of surveillance and control in which creativity and individuality refuse to be constrained.

Nicola Barker’s extravagant, rambling, joyous and more-than-slightly insane novels always present a certain challenge to the reader … No one else writes like Barker does…a reason to cherish her extraordinary work … [H(A)PPY is] an info-shamanic freakout. It’s a work of print art … You don’t read this novel; you let it pour over you … Once again: no one else writes like Barker, and no one else could have written this book.

Exquisite and unpredictable prose … fluidity is without a doubt the most prominent feature of this novel, which dips into poetry as abruptly as it springs up a diagram.

As a physical object this book itself is a work of art; a mind-bending adventure in typography and consciousness to be looked at as much as read.

As unconventional as its narrator … Mira A is out of kilter, and her rebellious thoughts and emotions cascade across the pages of this visually starting, hugely original tale in a burst of colour as she desperately struggles for freedom and independence over authoritarian control.

Profoundly different from anything I’ve read previously … I will keep coming back to the story for months to come.

Mira, the heroine of Nicola Barker’s hugely original book, strives to step outside the confines of the story that she has been told to keep, in a desperate struggle for freedom. A startling read.

Science fiction-meets-satire piece that mediates on the true meaning of life ... a must-read.

[A] visually starting, hugely original tale.

An essential story to read….Barker, whose previous novels have been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, continues to dazzle with H(A)PPY.

Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018.

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2018* 
*LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018* 
 
A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 
AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
From the internationally acclaimed, Man Booker-shortlisted Nicola Barker comes a new novel, a post-post apocalyptic story that overflows with pure creative talent. 
 
Imagine a perfect world where everything is known, where everything is open, where there can be no doubt, no hatred, no poverty, no greed. Imagine a System which both nurtures and protects. A Community which nourishes and sustains. An infinite world. A world without sickness, without death. A world without God. A world without fear. 
 
Could you...might you be happy there? 
 
H(A)PPY is a post-post apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland, a story which tells itself and then consumes itself. It's a place where language glows, where words buzz and sparkle and finally implode. It's a novel which twists and writhes with all the terrifying precision of a tiny fish in an Escher lithograph – a book where the mere telling of a story is the end of certainty.

The Cauliflower®

From the internationally acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated author Nicola Barker.

The punk poet, or madcap magician, of a particularly dismal sort of English environment ... [The Cauliflower] does somehow cohere into a complex, satisfying whole ... A collection of free-standing scenes that spring into vivid motion when you turn the pages ... Barker’s approach is cheerfully anachronistic: the text is peppered with references to cinema and pop singers ... [A] vibrant, funny, garrulous and lovely book. It is a celebration of spirituality and faith ... Perfectly balanced between clownish irreverence and hushed respect for the numinous.

What makes [The Cauliflower] distinctively Barkeresque is that she throws a literary hand grenade into the form of the historical novel as we know it ... Barker not only refuses to switch off, but spirals and giddies and churns relentlessly. The result is typically atypical, expectedly unexpected and inexplicably good. She really is a genius.

One of the most excitingly and exhaustively non-linear novelists around ... Such audacity comes with a style to match ... She opens up a mind-set usually incomprehensible to secular westerners ... Swifts, apparently, can’t feed on the ground, as their feet are unsuited to walking on it; instead, they live almost entirely on the wing. As such, they are an almost perfect metaphor for Barker’s dazzling, and defiantly non-pedestrian style ... This exuberantly imaginative novel about mysticism takes flight with panache.

[A] complex, funny book … Strange, febrile and utterly unique … A story packed with vitality, wit, sly charm and astonishing energy.

The novel is crammed with facts, history, research and the arcana of Hinduism — and Barker is determined to lay it out for us in all its richness ... This is an extremely ambitious book, playful, maddening, overlong, thought-provoking and rich. As an investigation of faith — which is what it must surely be — that’s not a bad way to go.

The result is typically atypical, expectedly unexpectedly and inexplicably good. She really is a genius

Were I to go into all my feelings about The Cauliflower®, this post would become as long as the book. Read it! I’m probably going to read it again, because there are so many nuances and observations that I’m sure I missed the first time through.

The Cauliflower brims with rich delicacies of arcana and ephemera ... [Barker] has created a zany, frustrating, brilliant work that, despite flaunting its historicity, does more to prove Barker's rich talent for invention.

A deeply researched piece whose fascinated impetuosity and esoteric mode of address still transmit a vast quantity of information about the guru and his life . . . watching Barker’s garrulous, profound, silly and bitingly intelligent mind at play is one of the greatest and most contagious delights in modern British fiction.

It’s another terrific novel from Nicola Barker. As an experiment in structure and form it’s fascinating, but as an exploration of the life of someone we could never hope to understand, it’s absolutely essential.

Comic and elaborate … A vivid panorama … The increasing pleasures to be found in The Cauliflower® arise not so much from espying the seams along which the novel’s texture is assembled as from the variously authoritative voices that tell this story from many competing perspectives.

A life story in all its mystical, magical human extremes . . . a mixture of irreverence and fascination, awe and appreciation, scepticism and wonderment, and it is so energetic that the pages fly . . . In The Cauliflower®, the most daring piece of storytelling to appear in English this year, faith is fact, imagination is knowledge.

The Cauliflower is an unconventional telling of a weird and wonderful story.

Barker's writing is completely original and insightful and bursting full of spirituality. The novel is thoroughly enjoyable.

Bizarre but very readable; this novel is recommended.

Barker’s writing is completely original and insightful.

'Extremely ambitious' Financial Times 
 
'An imaginative tour de force ... She really is a genius' Guardian 
 
'A delight' New Statesman 
 
FROM THE MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR NICOLA BARKER 
 
To the world he is Sri Ramakrishna - godly avatar, esteemed spiritual master, beloved guru. To temple owner, Rani Rashmoni, he is the Brahmin fated to defy tradition. But to Hriday, his nephew and long-time caretaker, he is just Uncle - maddening, bewildering Uncle, prone to entering trances at the most inconvenient of times, known to perform dangerous acts of self-effacement, who must be vigilantly safeguarded not only against jealous enemies but also against that most treasured yet insidious of sulphur-rich vegetables: the cauliflower.

Robert Macfarlane

Deborah Levy

Jenn Ashworth

Kamila Shamsie

Michael Donkor

Michèle Roberts

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Ross Raisin

Owen Sheers

Nicholas Shakespeare

Nat Segnit

Sophie Coulombeau

Christopher Hope

Scarlett Thomas

Erica Wagner

Nicola Barker

Ian Samson

Kirsty Gunn

Philip Hoare

30 Reflections from Exploring on Foot

22 writers talk about their memorable excursions and the act of walking, and share their creative observations 
 
In these six series, taken from BBC Radio 3's The Essay, an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere. Here are treks taken at daybreak and after dark; in winter and in spring; in the footsteps of the past; and - in the case of Robert Macfarlane - along the ridges of the South Downs. 
 
Dawnwalks and Night Walks find Nicholas Shakespeare, Nicola Barker, Kamila Shamsie, Ian Sansom, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Owen Sheers, Janice Galloway and John Walsh taking early morning and late-night strolls around locations ranging from their back garden and local cemetery to Manhattan, Paris, Tasmania and the Antarctic. 
 
Springwalks and Winterwalks feature Michele Roberts, Ross Raisin, John Walsh, Kirsty Gunn, Philip Hoare, Deborah Levy, Christopher Hope, Scarlett Thomas, Erica Wagner and Owen Sheers, as they sample the transforming qualities of spring and the wonders of winter. From Poland and the Languedoc to Hampstead Heath and the Yorkshire Wolds, they delight in the details of the landscape and reflect on what it means to them. 
 
Strange Strolls sees Jenn Ashworth, Michael Donkor, Stephanie Victoire, Nat Segnit and Sophie Coulombeau embarking on walks of entertaining eccentricity, revisiting favourite places including Wandsworth Bridge, the Blue Ridge mountains of Appalachia and Ibiza. 
 
And in A Five-Day Journey, Robert Macfarlane walks the length of the South Downs in monsoon rain and in sunshine, discovering its chalk trails and its ghosts. He ponders the relationship between paths and stories; explores the poet Edward Thomas' love affair with tracks; considers the concept of the Aboriginal Australian songline; re-imagines the life of artist Eric Ravilious; and contemplates the sometimes eerie relationship between walking, collecting and creation. 
 
Intimate, evocative and immersive, these 30 uplifting programmes transport us to a wealth of wonderful places, and offer fascinating personal insight into the inner worlds of our walker-writers. 
 
Production credits 
Produced by Duncan Minshull, Ciaran Bermingham and Tim Dee 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the following dates: 
 
Dawnwalks 
Nicholas Shakespeare 28 March 2016 
Nicola Barker 29 March 2016 
Kamila Shamsie 30 March 2016 
Ian Sansom 31 March 2016 
Lucy Hughes-Hallett 1 April 2016 
 
Night Walks 
Nicholas Shakespeare 27 October 2008 
Owen Sheers 28 October 2008 
Janice Galloway 29 October 2008 
Kamila Shamsie 30 October 2008 
John Walsh 31 October 2008 
 
Springwalks 
Michele Roberts in Poznan 31 March 2014 
Ross Raisin in the Yorkshire Wolds 1 April 2014 
John Walsh 2 April 2014 
Kirsty Gunn in Sutherland 3 April 2014 
Philip Hoare in Sholing 4 April 2014 
 
Winterwalks 
Deborah Levy on Hampstead Heath 18 February 2013 
Christopher Hope in Languedoc 19 February 2013 
Scarlett Thomas 20 February 2013 
Erica Wagner 21 February 2013 
Owen Sheers in Poland 22 February 2013 
 
Strange Strolls 
Jenn Ashworth - The Abiding Mental Riches of Preston 10 February 2020 
Michael Donkor - On Westminster Bridge 11 February 2020 
Stephanie Victoire - Dark Hollow Falls 12 February 2020 
Nat Segnit - The Other Ibiza 13 February 2020 
Sophie Coulombeau - Walking Matilda 14 February 2020 
 
A Five-Day Journey 
Marking 2 November 2009 
Haunting 3 November 2009 
Singing 4 November 2009 
Flying 5 November 2009 
Collecting 6 November 2009 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

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