- Nicola Barker

Wide Open

By Nicola Barker
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Winner of IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2000, Wide Open is the first of Nicola Barker’s Thames Gateway novels.

Poking out of the River Thames estuary, the strange Isle of Sheppey is home to a nudist beach, a nature reserve, a wild boar farm and not much else. The landscape is bleak, but the people are interesting. There’s Luke, who specialises in join-the-dots pornography and lippy, outraged Lily. They are joined by Jim, the 8-year-old Nathan and the mysterious, dark-eyed Ronnie.

Each one floats adrift in turbulent currents, fighting the rip tide of a past that swims with secrets. Only if they see through the lies and prejudice will they gain redemption. Wide Open is about coming to terms with the past, and the fantasies people construct in order to protect their fragile inner selves.

Author: Nicola Barker
Format: Paperback
Release Date: 28 Apr 2011
Pages: 300
ISBN: 978-0-00-743572-2
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