The Three Button Trick: Selected stories

By Nicola Barker

The best short stories from perhaps England’s finest young female comic writer.

This selection of Nicola Barker’s finest short stories contains work first published in ‘Heading Inland’ and ‘Love Your Enemies’.

A sixteen-year-old girl, in ‘Layla’s Nose Job’, is burdened with a grotesque nose. But plastic surgery only serves to demonstrate that her strangeness isn’t just skin-deep. The discovery turns her ingeniously violent. In ‘Inside Information’, Martha, a professional shoplifter, becomes pregnant and attempts to turn her pregnancy to criminal advantage, only to find herself harassed by her foetus, which can not only talk but proves to have grisly plans of its own. In three related pieces (‘Blisters’, ‘Braces’, and ‘Mr. Lippy’) featuring Wesley, a charming but damaged young man, attempts at normality are grimly, inevitably defeated. In ‘The Three Button Trick’, one of Barker’s most naturalistic, a middle-aged woman, who’s been abandoned by her husband, discovers, thanks to the ministrations of several odd acquaintances, how little she needs him and how wayward and liberating true eroticism is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780007391059

Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker’s work has been translated into numerous languages, and received great critical acclaim and numerous prizes. Her work includes Love Your Enemies, Wide Open (International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), Clear (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Darkmans (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and The Yips (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize). She was named as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists by in 2005.