From the internationally acclaimed, Man Booker-shortlisted Nicola Barker comes a new novel, a post-post apocalyptic story that overflows with pure creative talent.
Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels - including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches - and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018.
Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY is a work of vaulting ambition. It is
deathly serious but played out with the lightest of touches. She
takes the vapid discourse of social media blather, with all its
‘likes’ and ‘favourites’, and extrapolates madly to make a language
for an utterly believable future world, a world enslaved by the
blandness of its technology. Line by line, the novel carefully
builds its music and teases out its crazed riffs. It’s very funny
but there are pockets of great eeriness, and of savagery even. It’s
a novel-as-object, too, with a typography employed as visual code,
but its design always has a narrative purpose. Only a writer of
uncanny ability could bring this novel to such memorable, pulsing
life. It’s very moving.
*Kevin Barry*
H(A)PPY is anything but conventional, subverting the traditions of
sci-fi, typography and narrative … The coloured words are joined by
a host of typographical flourishes, making the book a bravura piece
of design … Barker is as gnomic, terrifying and glorious as
ever.
*Guardian*
Nicola Barker’s kaleidoscopic new novel is a socio-political
futurama with a wildness and honesty all of its own … What wonders
there are in Nicola Barker’s bewildering, fatiguing and deliciously
stimulating new novel … Echoing and quoting literary styles and
situations, disrupting the words on the page – via those coloured
inks, blank pages, typographical games – in a manner that traces a
line from Laurence Sterne to avant-gardists such as BS Johnson,
Deborah Levy and Tom McCarthy … But H(a)ppy ventures far beyond a
retread of narratological theory … Any description of H(a)ppy can
only fail to do justice to its wildness and its honesty. It is a
superb novel by a genuinely experimental and committed novelist. In
Barker’s hand, narrative, however fragile, not only survives but
thrives.
*Observer*
(Barker) specialises in formal eccentricity, thematic novelty,
stylistic excess ... Her new book is her strangest yet, an
avant-garde slice of dystopian science fiction that thumbs its
nose...at the conventions of the genre ... It is a small miracle
that this uncompromising anti-novel about the collapse of narrative
absolutely works ... Barker is as innovative and idiosyncratic as
ever.
*Sunday Times*
No book Nicola Barker writes is remotely like a book by anyone
else, which is one of the many reasons to celebrate her. Also, no
two books by Nicola Barker are doing remotely the same thing, which
is another. So you never quite know what you’re in for. And
H(A)PPY, even by her own extravagant standards, is very strange
indeed … Barker has always been a visionary writer – visionary in
style, with past and present interpenetrating in dream and
hallucination. But her interest in religious visions and theology
here comes to the fore … As I say, Barker is not remotely like any
other writer. With its typographical jiggering about (words really
do change colour, and some pages have blocks of identical text or
no text at all), and its favouring of symbols and ideas over
characters, setting and story, it’s more like a poem or artwork
than a novel. Still, it’s quite something. I’m just not sure
what.
*Literary Review*
With polychromatic printing, creative typography and sheer
inspiration, the post-apocalyptic novel has been turned on its head
… In most fiction set in totalitarian states, the principal
protagonist will gradually realise the monstrosity of the
regime…Nicola Barker, one of our greatest contemporary novelists,
with typical élan, turns this paradigm inside out … This must be
the most beautifully designed book I have read since Mark Z
Danielewski’s House of Leaves … As the novel progresses, Barker
pulls off an astonishing piece of technique … She is the most
unpredictable novelist I know.
*The Scotsman*
The English novelist Nicola Barker began publishing in the
mid-1990s, hit her stride almost immediately … Barker seems to find
writing fiction as natural as breathing, and there’s a strong
imaginative streak to almost everything she does … The Prospero
role is here assumed by Barker herself, and the parallel is fairly
close: creative to excess, more than capable of abusing her
omnipotence, blurring the border between genius and dazzle.
*New Statesman*
A trailblazing sci-fi writer makes a bleak future seem fun ...
Nicola Barker is the high priestess of weird ... H(A)PPY is the
story of one woman's escape from a controlling matrix formed by a
powerful artificial intelligence ... As Mira's journey of
emancipation progresses, a full-on typographic melodrama explodes
off the page ... It's confusing but fun. Barker, along with David
Mitchell and Dave Eggers, is an important trailblazer for literary
sci-if. H(A)PPY does not present a cheerful version of the future
of humanity, but in her hands it is a hauntingly convincing
one.
*The Times*
Lately, no destination on the map of fiction has welcomed so many
visitors as the twin islands of utopia and dystopia. When she
entered this populous domain, Nicola Barker – the rule-busting,
genre-twisting maverick author of 11 previous novels – was never
likely to deliver an orthodox post-catastrophe fable of lonely
revolt against an all-powerful, all-knowing tyranny … As ever,
Barker spins her ingredients into a wild, antic performance with a
tuning – comic, satirical, mystical, downright weird – all her own
… You might treat H(A)PPY as a creative uprising against the iron
laws of dystopia itself … Beautifully designed pages … An occult
musical theme drifts through her dystopian architecture … At times
I was tempted to read H(A)PPY as a delirious allegory of the
“tuning wars” among musicians … Barker layers the emerging tale of
Mira’s disobedience with overtones that hum in the background … Not
only the ideas but the very words on the page spiral, loop, morph
and shatter. Barker’s expressive typography enacts the breakdowns,
and breakthroughs, of Mira’s mutiny: not some avant-garde stunt,
but the method of George Herbert’s “pattern poems”, or of Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy … She succeeds in tuning the dystopian
genre to a fresh, uncanny pitch.
*Financial Times*
H(A)PPY is Barker’s most audacious and important novel since
Darkmans … A clever exploration of the compulsive and destructive
power of narrative … Language, grammar and typography spiral out of
control until they reach the crescendo of a typographical cathedral
composed of a “billion tiny calculations” … Barker has always been
a wildly experimental writer and never more so than now … [H(A)PPY]
demonstrates her visceral sensitivity to words.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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