Books by A. L. Barker

The Joy-Ride and After was A.L. Barker's third collection of shorter pieces, first published in 1963. It offers three novellas, linked by certain recurrent characters and by their variations on the themes of loneliness and insecurity. The first tells of what has led to a young garage-hand 'borrowing' his employer's car, and of the disastrous consequences that ensue. In the second, a betrayed wife loses her memory after an accident, and finds herself on a barge with an old reprobate. The third concerns the tribulations of a canteen manager who has an inscrutable boss and an extravagant wife. Whether they live in slum tenement or suburban semi-detached, these 'ordinary' people become alive and phenomenal to us through the force and sympathy of Barker's imagination.

''Inspiration'', she decides, ''is divine intervention and I've been chosen to be intervened''.' Sunday Times'Barker depicts Zeph's literary pretensions and plagiarism in a dazzling collage of pastiche and self-mockery, parodying a range of English literary styles from Tennyson to Booker-derived poetic-prose posturing.

These humorous yet tragic vignettes are all concerned with unfulfilled and usually perverted sexual relations - but how do they relate to the narrator's own successful marriage?

At the centre of events, is the Gooseboy, a creature with a double face, half faun, half deformed horror...The Gooseboy questions the relations between flesh and spirit, the ridiculous and the terrible.

A collection of ghost stories in which an academic is haunted by his dead colleague's certainty, a tutor is confronted with an eight year old's mortal secret and Aunt Selena's dancing bear appears from beyond the grave.

Edith Trembath's charming inability to cope with problems of everyday life is a constant source of embarrassment to her friends and family.

Includes eleven stories about people who, for good or bad, need each other; people in love or in need of love; and, people growing up and growing old.

As a child, Ellie compulsively lies her way into trouble. She idealizes a beautiful school friend, only to uncover (with morbid fascination) a strange relationship between her friend and a middle-aged chemist.

Barker's 1964 collection of short stories casts a glint of the most revealing light on the characters within - and makes them more real than the everyday people we meet.

A man who can evoke no feeling over his wife's desertion is finally moved to tears of grief over a dying fox; and a soldier, recuprating from wounds and shock, finds himself drawn to the elderly woman who has taken him in, despite the looming presence of her rather fussy country draper husband.

She's a spiritual hobo - independent, erratic, rootless and romatic - and Charles finds himself inexplicably attracted to her, and having to face up to the truth about who he really is.

But the situation isn't as simple as all that, and soon it causes unexpceted ructions and confrontations - and Rose finds herself turning back the clock to remember a childhood vacation spent at the Marigny chateau in France ...

'An extraordinary achievement.' A. S. ByattJohn Brown's Body, first published in 1969, was A.L. Barker's fourth novel and was shortlisted for the second annual Booker Prize in 1970.Marise Tomelty is the young wife of a travelling salesman, who dislikes sex and is terrified of open spaces. Ralph Shilling, a dealer in pesticides, lives in the flat above the Tomeltys'. One day Marise's husband casually mentions that he recognises Ralph as John Brown: a man acquitted, for lack of evidence, of the gruesome double murder of two sisters. Nevertheless, Marise encourages Ralph's attentions, intoxicated by a heady mix of passion and fear.'She is formidable, and from a bare corner of human relations gathers a rich harvest.' Adam Mars-Jones'It would be hard to find anyone who chooses words more exactly or constructs with more precision.' Penelope Fitzgerald

Originally published in 1999, The Haunt, set in a seedy, decaying hotel on the Cornish coast, was to be the final entry in A. L. Barker's brilliant fifty-year writing career. 'The Haunt is the novel that A. L. Barker had just finished [in 1998] when she was struck down by a disabling illness... [It] is probably her best... It is an examination of what being haunted means, and whether we can do anything about it. Auden once said that there is nothing to be done about it. We must sit it out. This is grim advice. But if A. L. Barker is saying this too - and I think she is - she doesn't say it grimly. She says it lightly, not cynically but hilariously. She understands that there can be pleasure alongside unease: the delicious first stirrings of infidelity, the comforts of offered love to the old and ridiculous. She knows us all.' Jane Gardam, Spectator

A. L. Barker's debut story collection appeared in 1947 and won the inaugural Somerset Maugham prize, instantly marking her out as a remarkable new talent. Each story describes a crisis in life; each reveals the impact of experience upon innocence, or vice versa.'[Barker's] remarkable descriptive powers, her feeling for the exact word and the right combination of adjectives are most satisfyingly applied to the evocation of landscape... Barker writes with a subtlety and precision which are as delightful as they are rare.' Times Literary Supplement'This collection of eight short stories... introduces an already assured and subtle stylist... There is little pity here, but - if restrained - considerable terror and tragedy, and a precision of observation and treatment which qualify this collection for a critical, fastidious audience.' Kirkus Reviews

All are shaped and incorporated to form a wholly individual narrative in which 'some of the facts are here, and a lot of fiction, with truth in all of it.''Her glancing, allusive writing carries one along easily, darting from invention to invention .

'You start alone, you finish alone,' she says: 'It's fine to be alone, it's a revelation, truth at last.'This is the story of Almayer Jenkin's progress through life, from a motherless childhood through adult love affairs and her own experience of motherhood.