The Yips

The Man Booker Prize-nominated novel by one of the most original authors of our time Storm clouds are gathering above the bar of the less-than-exclusive Thistle Hotel. Stuart Ransom, a jet-setting, supermodel-chasing pro golfer with an extravagant ego and a career nearing the end of a spectacular decline, is drinking his way through the night. Desperate for attention, he strikes up free-flowing conversations with anyone who will listen. But as he banters with Jen, the impish barmaid with a talent for telling tall tales rivaled only by Stuart's own, the night takes an extraordinary turn. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a tattooist with a mad mother and a love of anything from the 1940s; a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more conservative wife; the mysterious Vicki, the sister of Stuart's defiant yet curiously devoted manager; and a misguided female vicar of the Church of England and her husband, Gene, the Thistle's hapless bartender. They are a highly entertaining and eccentric bunch, but there's more to them than meets the eye. "There enter in questions of what it is to be consumed by love or lust, by shame, by the longing to be someone else or nobody" (The Guardian), and The Yips unites them in an absorbing, exhilarating tour de force.

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 :
"[D]ementedly imaginative . . . stomach-turningly hilarious . . . What she has written is a state of the nation novel of the sort Dickens and Hogarth might have jointly conjured up had they ever visited Luton." --Financial Times "There are moments when Stuart Ransom has the vulgar bravura of John Self in Martin Amis's Money. And occasionally, the novel also reminds one of Hilary Mantel - a comparable master of dark comedy. But Barker is unique and it is for the pleasures of her style that one reads her." -The Observer (London) "She is scatological, mischievous, subversive and original. Barker's transfiguration of the commonplace is radically unlike Muriel Spark's, but no less dazzling." --The Times (London) "Barker captures--and lovingly distorts--both the rhythms and banality of language. She is, as it were, Harold Pinter on crack." --The Spectator