The Yips

‘Barker is ostensibly a comic writer, and is indeed snort-inducingly funny at times … But Barker is neither a classicist nor a modernist: she is working in the realist tradition. What’s more – just about uniquely in this country – she is thinking intelligently and critically about how to make that tradition work in the present day. But it’s not for her virtue that she deserves to be read; it’s for pleasure. Apart from all else, she is very good on love, of both the married and the physical sort, assuming they are two different things – which, of course, the realist tradition tends to assume they are.’ Keith Miller, Daily Telegraph

‘English fiction’s great eccentric offers up a typically riotous saga’ Guardian

‘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’s for the pleasures of her style that one reads her.’ Kate Kellaway, Observer

‘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, Ruth Scurr

‘… we are reminded that Barker is a novelist of both epically large and trivially small … The result is more consistently surprising that War and Peace, at least.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘There is nothing conventional about THE YIPS … its originality, its charm or its peculiar beauty. Barker is in many ways a challenging and discomforting writer, yet her work is full of straightforward reading pleasures. She combines serious intentions with lightness of touch, toughness with compassion, and has a unique imagination’ Sunday Times