'A vastly satisfying and adventurous novel, a state-of-the-nation comedy from a novelist who can do pretty much anything she likes and is having a great time doing it. This really isn't a book to pass up.' - Daily Telegraph 'This is the work of a writer in love with language and the ways people employ it to express themselves!nothing short of dazzling.' - Observer 'A superb comic novel!the collective, whispery subconscious of a small community is brilliantly suggested through almost imperceptible echoes.' - Daily Mail 'Intensely pleasurable. Barker's sheer energy is irresistible while the intelligence that drives this small comic universe is both spikily awkward and sweetly benign! For inventiveness and verve! no one else comes close.' - Guardian 'The cacophony of voices is the perfect showcase for Barker's linguistic games. From love-letters to suicide notes, her language vaults, somersaults and cartwheels across the page! it might just win her a new legion of fans tempted by this funny, heartbreaking book.' - Sunday Telegraph 'Hilarious! On every page there is more energy, wordplay, and sheer delight in what language is, or does, than most of her contemporaries can muster in a whole chapter! pure, unadulterated entertainment.' - The Times 'A vastly satisfying and adventurous novel, a state-of-the-nation comedy from a novelist who can do pretty much anything she likes and is having a great time doing it. This really isn't a book to pass up.' - Daily Telegraph 'This is the work of a writer in love with language and the ways people employ it to express themselves! nothing short of dazzling.' - Observer 'A superb comic novel! the collective, whispery subconscious of a small community is brilliantly suggested through almost imperceptible echoes.' - Daily Mail 'Intensely pleasurable. Barker's sheer energy is irresistible while the intelligence that drives this small comic universe is both spikily awkward and sweetly benign! For inventiveness and verve! no one else comes close.' - Guardian 'The cacophony of voices is the perfect showcase for Barker's linguistic games. From love-letters to suicide notes, her language vaults, somersaults and cartwheels across the page! it might just win her a new legion of fans tempted by this funny, heartbreaking book.' - Sunday Telegraph Reviews for Darkmans: 'This is the work of a very fine storyteller indeed.' - The Times 'The writing is often hilarious. Barker carves up the suburban dinner party savagely, and anatomises the dodgiest builder on Earth! Nicola Barker's writing is hugely attractive, because it conjures images and ideas from a tremendous wealth of inspiration. It is the product of a powerful, sprawling imagination.' - Daily Telegraph 'A loud shout of glorious, untidy, angry, joyous life. Barker is a great, restless novelist, and "Darkmans" is a great, restless novel. At the end of 838 blinding, high-octane pages, I was bereft that there weren't 838 more.' - Guardian When a new novel by Nicola Barker arrives, there is a host of reasons to break into a smile. Chief among them is that she is one of the most exhilarating, audacious and, for want of a better word, ballsy writers of her generation. And, in a publishing terrain that often inhibits ambition and promotes homogeneity, there is nobody writing quite like her.' - Observer 'A visionary epic.' Sam Leith, in the Spectator 'Books of the Year' 'Darkmans is all about the ebullience of language, the erruption of the past into the present, the seriousness and darkness of jokes. It defies moderation because it celebrates misrule. Highly original and interesting, and doing it with conviction and sharp humour. I know I whipped through its more than 800 pages with attention unbroken. And I know that the very night I finished it, it showed up in my dreams. Seriously.' - Literary Review

Nicola Barker 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. Her second story collection, Heading Inland, received the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her novel Wide Open won the IMPAC Prize in 2000, and Clear was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004. She is one of Granta's 'Best Young British Novelists' of the decade.