'I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror'

Love Your Enemies Paperback

Love Your Enemies

Nicola Barker

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.

Reviews of Love Your Enemies

    • ‘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

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