TonyInterruptor

Reviews / Votes

Barker is adept at capturing the paradoxes and absurdities of contemporary life... Riffing on her themes - art and authenticity in a digital world, intergenerational divides, cancel culture - Barker draws us into her characters' fragmented thoughts, the connections they make, the meanings they find in love and life... Pitch-perfect... [a] witty, gleefully disruptive novel * Financial Times * A witty, hyperactive satire on art and authenticity... An out-of-the-ordinary author doing what others don't... A 224-page cacophony of argument over art, authenticity and selfhood... It's a mark of Barker's artistry that we're actually made to care about the ensuing emotions, rather than viewing the characters merely as puppets for satire * Observer * Brilliantly over-the-top... Barker is known for experiment and brainy whimsy. There could be no better person to write a comedy about art and its discontents... It's a rollercoaster kind of excess, where the best part is that it's too much... Barker seems incapable of putting a foot wrong. This is satire that sees right through you, but forgives you and teaches you to forgive yourself. It's that rare thing, a serious work of art that is also a giddy confection: a vehicle of pure delight -- Sandra Newman * Guardian * A comic masterpiece... This is smart, calculated, musical prose: no word is out of place, no reference made without provocation... TonyInterruptor is as obtrusive as it is resplendent. It demands to be read * Telegraph * Nicola Barker is the kind of novelist to arouse a baffled envy in the reader...The novel is both loose & tight, at its ease & willed... As elegant as it is quietly moving. TonyInterruptor is an eccentric triumph * Times Literary Supplement * A comic tour de force... In scenes that are cleverly crafted and almost amorous, Barker's characters compulsively correct their interlocutors... [TonyInterruptor] showcases her skill as a comic writer. An eccentricity of expression and a winningly agile approach to plot proves that Barker has a virtuosic command of the haphazard and the apparently arbitrary * Irish Times * The zaniest voice in modern English fiction... Nicola Barker is our laureate of the edge. This, her latest dispatch from the periphery, is a brilliant, if bewildering, novel with an eccentric take on the many ways we fail to live our lives honestly * Literary Review * [Barker's] whacked out comedies have lots to say about the absurdities of modern living... Barker is a supreme ironist... She mines plenty of riotous comedy here from the hall of mirrors circus of contemporary digital life * Daily Mail * [A] clever comic novel, which brilliantly interrogates our understanding of the internet, love and truth * Vogue * [Has] all the emotional chaos and sharp wit of Fleabag - but in male form. Filled with eccentricity, this is a brilliant story about the struggle for authenticity in the digital age * Elle * Nicola Barker is such a mercurial, capricious novelist that it is sometimes occludes the fact that she is a profoundly serious writer... A joy and a challenge, an irreverence and a gauntlet... Barker's characters always have a human hinterland... There is a fluency across the novel... poignant slash excruciating * Scotland on Sunday * A hilarious, important novel. A correct and a real one. There is something in the writing that is wild in a virtuosic way and, needless to say, hugely intelligent -- Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold There is a direct river running from Chaucer, through Laurence Sterne and William Blake, picking up jetsam from Angela Carter and Martin Amis and erupting wonderfully in Nicola Barker, one of Britain's Greatest novelists. TonyInterruptor is a joyous and exhilarating ride which pushes you through the rabbit warren of art, literature and the human soul -- Camilla Grudova A blizzard of a novel - an account of disobedience and transformation; connection and departure. Barker's characters collide with one another gleefully, and the use of language is sublime. I found myself bouncing from one page to the next -- Fiona Mozley This book is extremely funny. It is deliriously pacy. It radiates with righteousness and purity of heart. It is truly unusual and truly new and it proves, once again, that Nicola Barker is a tribune of the human imagination -- Aidan Cottrell-Boyce No one writes like Barker... Tonyinterruptor is a wise, funny, spiritual and deeply human novel -- Ben Masters Barker dials her prose up to such bombastic levels it suggests a sort of opera of the mundane. If you appreciate language as a plaything, and novelists being permitted to write with freedom, this contains multitudes * Buzz Magazine * A breakneck ride, reflecting not just the content of online life - our infinite distractibility - but its chaotic form too... Energising... For all its eccentricities, TonyInterruptor is a seriously intended work * Times * A freeform - and very funny - play on everything from art and authenticity to cancel culture. Fans of Barker's distinctive brand of literary comedy will not be disappointed. Newbies, welcome to the party * Marie Claire *