Wide Open

Description

Winner of IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2000, Wide Open is the first of Nicola Barker's Thames Gateway novels. 'Wide Open' is set on the strange Isle Of Sheppey, which pokes out into into the estuary of the River Thames. On this forgotten misty island there is a nudist beach, a nature reserve, a wild boar farm and not much else. The landscape is bare, but the characters are brimming with life. There's Luke, who specialises in dot-to-dot pornography, and lippy Lily, just 17 and full of outrageous anger. They are joined by Jim and the 8-year-old, Nathan, as well as the mysterious figure of Ronnie, who though plain has dark, telling eyes. Each one is drifting in turbulent, emotional currents, fighting the rip tide of a past, bleak with secrets and fear. Years later adult Nathan works in a Lost Property department, an irony that is almost brutal in its compassion. A novel about stripping off layers of prejudice and lies, about the possibility of redemption, and laying bare the truth. It is also about coming to terms with the past, and about the fantasies people construct in order to protect their fragile inner selves.

Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She lives and works in east London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories (1993). Her first novel Reversed Forecast was published in 1994 and a short novel Small Holdings followed in 1995. A second collection of short stories Heading Inland, for which Nicola received an Arts Council Writers' Award, and received the 1997 John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her story 'Symbiosis' was filmed and broadcast on BBC2; another story, 'Dual Balls', was commissioned for broadcast on Channel 4 and shortlisted for a BAFTA Award. Her third novel Wide Open was published in 1998, and won the English-speaking world's biggest literary award for a single work, the IMPAC Prize. In 2000 she published another short novel, Five Miles from Outer Hope. Her fifth novel, Behindlings, was published in 2002 and the following novel, Clear, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004. Darkmans, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2007, the 2008 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award and won the Hawthornden Prize for 2008. Most recently, Barker's work The Yips has been longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2012. She was named as one of the 20 Best Young British Novelists by Granta in 2005. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

'Wide Open is word perfect, witty and ironic...The author's focus on marginal lives and on the importance of the dispossessed and the apparently mad persuade us finally that Wide Open possesses a manic energy and taut eloquence worthy of a large, serious and global readership.' Impac Prize judging panel 'Razor-sharp comic sensibility and flawless structure' Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday 'It combines Nicola Barker's trademark qualities of offbeat comedy and quirky characterisation with an emotional darkness and depth that marked it, for many critics, as her breakthrough ...The novel mixes an eccentric island backdrop - a Barker speciality - with a cast of intriguing oddballs, pin-sharp comic dialogue, and a sinister undercurrent of violence and abuse' Independent