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'Compelling. Barker's narrative draws us in with the disturbing, surreal touch of a latter-day Lewis Carroll' Sunday Times 'Barker's eccentrics are the stuff of pure farce. And they allow her to reinvent, joyously, the cogs, gears and mechanics of the genre. She knows, as Wodehouse also knew, how to rev up the language, do baroque variations on a phrase, even break into a kind of poetry' New York Times 'Dazzling... She celebrates the complexity of human experience' The Times 'Nicola Barker's linguistic exuberance got me hooked ... Like an angel dancing on the head of a pin, she takes a brief event in the crowded capital and uses it to whoop and whirl ... impressive, smart, funny, fast' Observer 'Insanely inventive. Her vision of a marginal Britain populated by drifters and desperados is fired by a comic energy that dances on the edge of self-combustion' Guardian