Five Miles from Outer Hope

An instant classic of teenage self-discovery by prize-winning Nicola Barker, an "anarchic and lovingly perverse writer" (Ali Smith) Summer, 1981. Medve, sixteen years old and six foot three in her crocheted stockings, is marooned in a semi-derelict hotel on a tiny island off the coast of Devon, England. There's nothing to do but paint novelty mugs, dream of literary murders, and despair of her gothically unprepossessing family--including Mo, her sex toy-inventing mother; Poodle, her shamefully flat-chested sister; and four-year-old Feely, who wants to grow up to be a bulimic. Until one day a ginger-headed stranger arrives . . . One of our most enjoyably unconventional contemporary writers, Nicola Barker, roots out the darkly surreal in a forgotten corner of the world. Five Miles from Outer Hope is a startling, luminous book, and Medve's voice speaks bluntly from the heart, with results that are original and poignant.

About the Author :
Nicola Barker s eight previous novels include Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize), Wide Open (winner of the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and Clear (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in East London. "

Review :
"If you ever despair that young British female writing is only concerned with marriage, men and weight problems, you just need to pick up one of Barker's books to reassure yourself that all is not bland . . . She writes of the comic and sometimes sinister surrealism of ordinary people's lives, and the results are books to make you wince, gasp and laugh out loud. The latest addition . . . is a sharp, deft account of teenage frustration." --The Independent "The pages are alive with arch metaphors, apt similes, puns and riddles . . . A challenging evocation of that strange, magical, bewildering period between a child and reaching adulthood." --Financial Times "At times comic and whimsical, sometimes sad and occasionally grating, 'Five Miles from Outer Hope' is always fresh, original and tightly written." --The Times (London) "It's a first-love, rites of passage novel, refreshingly free of rose-tinted sentiment . . . by the way, it's also very funny." --The Literary Review "This novel, which cleverly sidesteps the traps of earnestness and seriousness, could well be read as a sort of literary tonic for enervation and grumpiness, the latest welcome dispatch from Barker's determinedly perverse and ungovernable imagination." --The Guardian