Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780007193639
ISBN: 0007193637
Label: HarperPerennial
Manufacturer: HarperPerennial
Number Of Pages: 848
Publication Date: March 03, 2008
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Studio: HarperPerennial

---

Related Items:

• The Gathering
• Animal's People
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• What Was Lost
• On Chesil Beach
• see more

Alternate Versions: Click to Display

Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display

---

Rating: - Very weird
This is one very weird book. Once you've established that and come to terms with it, it's much easier to enjoy. It's written in a style which I found intensely irritating, full of irregular paragraph spacing and with an obsessive overuse of brackets, and while I came to tolerate it I certainly never grew to like it.

For the first hundred or so pages I disliked it so much that I seriously considered giving up (an extreme measure for me). After that I became more engrossed in the story ... Read More

---

Rating: - Love or hate
Anyone who has trawled through all the reviews can see for themselves, opinions are usually either 5 stars or one star. There are a few middling but not many. I hated it. I agree with those who say the style of writing is particularly irritating and bears no resemblance to real life dialoge, there is a dreadful lack of plot (okay for some books, but the blurb leads one to expect the opposite)and its, quite frankly, boring. And for 840 pages, thats a lot of boredom.

I lot of hype in my opinion ... Read More

---

Rating: - Dull (boring)
This is one of the most boring books I've ever read. The constant (about 3 times in every paragraph) use of brackets is really off putting (the author constantly points out the obvious) and hugely irritating and pointless (she uses these to include information that has no need to be in brackets). I trawled through it hoping that something may happen in line with the back cover description to no avail (it didn't happen).

Many times throughout the book I had to put it down out of sheer frustration ... Read More

---

Rating: - what a drivel
Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize?? Please! Makes you question the opinions of the Guardian and Observer reviewers. I wasted hours of my time, lost count of the use of SCOWL after about 30, "scowling" comes up on every other page - you call that good writing? The book is so frustrating it made me write my first review on the Internet ever.

---

Rating: - Magnificent
I'm not going to go into long plot explanations - others have done it already far better than I could. I just want to say that this is a magnificent novel. I've not read any Nicola Barker before, and I was just blown away by the sheer audacity and exuberance of her prose. Yes, this book is long, but within a few pages I was completely gripped, barely able to put it down as it built up an exquisite dramatic tension. Barker develops, layer by layer, scene by scene, an almost anarchic assortment of characters, throws ... Read More

---