Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000004608885 | PR6052.A64876 C53 2005 | Open Access Book | Creative Book | Searching... |
Searching... | 30000004608844 | PR6052.A64876 C53 2005 | Open Access Book | Creative Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
Longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. A raucous, novel about the circus surrounding David Blaine's starvation stunt at Tower Bridge, from a Granta Best of British Novelist.
On 5th September 2003, New York illusionist David Blaine gets into a small Perspex box next to the River Thames and begins starving himself. 44 days later, he comes out again, four stone lighter. This much is clear.
Yet the huge crowds which gather to sneer and worship and get drunk and throw eggs seem to have very different ideas about what - if anything - this macabre spectacle might mean. For some it's a religious experience. For others it's the perfect excuse for a post-pub punch-up.
For Adair Graham MacKenny - a 28-year-old fashion victim whose uber-cool landlord is giving him an inferiority complex - the human zoo which surrounds Blaine is simply a great place to pick up girls. Until an exquisitely shod woman with a plastic bag full of Tupperware calls him a pimp...And Nicola Barker's riotous peep-show of a novel opens out into a hilarious and thought-provoking portrait of a world of illusion, delusion, celebrity and hunger.
Author Notes
Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She lives and works in east London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories (1993). Her first novel Reversed Forecast was published in 1994 and a short novel Small Holdings followed in 1995. A second collection of short stories Heading Inland, for which Nicola received an Arts Council Writers' Award, and received the 1997 John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her story 'Symbiosis' was filmed and broadcast on BBC2; another story, 'Dual Balls', was commissioned for broadcast on Channel 4 and shortlisted for a BAFTA Award. Her third novel Wide Open was published in 1998, and won the English-speaking world's biggest literary award for a single work, the IMPAC Prize. In 2000 she published another short novel, Five Miles from Outer Hope. Her fifth novel, Behindlings, was published in 2002 and the following novel, Clear, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004. Darkmans, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2007, the 2008 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award and won the Hawthornden Prize for 2008. Most recently, Barker's work THE YIPS has been longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2012. She was named as one of the 20 Best Young British Novelists by Granta in 2005. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
