DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Love Your Enemies

Nicola Barker author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers

Published:28th Apr '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Love Your Enemies cover

From the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker, the short stories in ‘Love Your Enemies’ present a loving depiction of the beautiful, the grotesque and the utterly bizarre in the lives of overlooked suburban Britons.

Layla Carter, 16, from North London, is utterly overwhelmed by her plus-size nose. Rosemary, recently widowed and the ambivalent owner of a bipolar tomcat, meets a satyr in her kitchen and asks, ‘Can I feel your fur?’

In these ten enticingly strange short stories, a series of marginalised characters seek truth in the obsession and oppression of everyday existence, via a canine custody battle, sex in John Lewis and some strangely expressive desserts.

‘One of the most exhilarating, audacious and ballsy writers of her generation’ Observer

‘Barker's writing is an antidote to, a laughing cure to, and an energiser for the more moribund forms of Englishness and English fiction’ Ali Smith, Guardian

‘Like Roald Dahl, Barker can take a commonplace situation – cooking a meal, starting a diet, taking in a stray – and use it to bounce off into a surreal fantasy world’ Independent

ISBN: 9780007436033

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 13mm

Weight: 150g

300 pages