Nicola Barker Books In Order

Publication Order of Digital Trilogy Books

Publication Order of Thames Gateway Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Park Stories Books

Publication Order of Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays Books

Nicola Barker is an author that has made a name for himself for being a prolific author in the manner of Charles Dickens.

The author was born in 1966 in Ely, Cambridgeshire but was brought up in South Africa until her early teenage years. She came back to the UK as a fourteen-year-old and went to Cambridge-based King’s College for her advanced studies.
While she is just 50, she has so far published more than 10 novels, three of which made the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. She is also the author of at least three collections of short stories.

For her work, Barker has won several prestigious awards and prizes including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the MacMillan Silver Pen Award, and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

Living in South Africa in her childhood and early teenage years, Nicola Barker was shocked by the brutality of the apartheid regime.

Her young mind was exposed to the awful hypocrisies and contradictions of a world where skin tone was what determined value.

It was then that things became so personal for Barker and she knew that it was important to speak the truth and choose sides.

It was from her experiences in South Africa that she got her agenda-driven voice and the moral force that runs in almost all of her works.

While she can sometimes be playful, she is a very serious writer who sees her central goal as one of truth-telling and truth-seeking.

Above her writing desk, she proudly shows a 1960 painting by Michael Ayrton that speaks of her inclinations. The work is of Cassandra driven insane by what she is saying but nonetheless speaking her truth regardless of the consequences.
She has said that it has always been an empowering and scary painting all at the same time. This is what she tries to do with her writing as she wants readers to feel they are terrifying, compulsive, and necessary.

After living in London for years, Nicola Barker moved to Faversham in Kent on a whim. Part of it was because it was the setting for Arden of Faversham which is one of her favorite plays.

She currently lives with Ben Thompson her partner who works as a music critic. To keep the two company is a French bull terrier and a Boston terrier that snore like old men while the two debate and converse.

From her home, she can usually look out and watch the trucks passing by and during good weather, she can go up to the roof and see the countryside around for miles.

Having been a writer for decades, she has said that she usually waits for the right time when enthusiasm and ideas infuse into her fiction.

When she is not writing her novels or lounging with her husband, she loves to take walks in the farmland, marshes, and creeks which provide atmospheric settings. These have sometimes made it into her fiction works.

Nicola Barker’s novel “Wide Open” is a bizarre, weird, compelling, fascinating, gross, creepy, and unputdownable work of fiction.

It is a dark and quirky story of a range of damaged people whose lives intersect in interesting ways. The extraordinary work takes its reader into a tiny English town and into the minds of some ordinary people.
There is the weed killer Ronny who surprisingly finds he has a lot in common with the man who commits suicide on the bridge; Nathan who works in the Lost Property department and is the son of a known pedophile;
Sara the keeper of a boar farm and her teenage daughter Lily who was born with a blood disorder and unformed organs.

It is a sometimes hopeful, sad, and hilarious but starkly original work that showcases the author’s exceptional literary talent.

Barker pens flawed characters but over the course of the story, we come to learn how they came to be that way. In some places, the knowledge could be disturbing but over time we come to care for the characters.
In fact, we even hope that they will overcome the issues they have to deal with.

“Behindlings” by Nicola Barker is n interesting story that introduces a man named Wesley. He is a man with a nasty wit, kinetic energy, and kindness to animals that should rightly be a star.
In fact, stardom always seems to follow him as it turns up everywhere he happens to be and waits for him at every corner.

Wesley calls his followers Behindlings and they make quite the motley crew with their weird manners, irritating habits, and questionable intentions. However, despite how disparate they may seem they are untied in the pursuit of Wesley their common prize.

But while some chase after Wesley, some such as Catherine Turpin simply stay put. The latter’s failings are broadcast to the world and they are sometimes painted on the walls of townhouses.

When Jo Bean who is one of Wesley’s newest followers becomes more interested in standing up to Catherine rather than working with her fellow behindlings, things come to a head.

Nicola Barker writes an inimitable character in Wesley and his behindlings to make for a thrilling plot that has to be one of his most compelling to date.

Nicola Barker’s novel “Darkmans” is a brilliant work of fiction with a plot that comes with interlinked pathways that each of the characters takes over the course of the story.

It opens with a chance meeting between Kane the prescription drug-dealing and Beede, his austerely modernity antipathetic, and efficient father.

It does seem that the devilish spirit named Scogin has taken over Isidore’s body, who has recently been exhibiting some odd behaviors and has been having memory lapses.

Nonetheless, as the story progresses, the author introduces some secondary characters while some are taken out. The characters are often involved in each other’s affairs as there are also linkages with the past.
Some of these linkages include erroneous decisions, old guilts, mistakes, grudges, conquests, betrayals, and affairs.

The characters show that they have commonality, particularly when they all show signs of being possessed by the impish spirit for reasons they cannot explain.