An awkward and solitary boy at school, James Jessel is surprised to find himself befriended by the impetuous, self-assured Waldo Klein, and bemused by Waldo's invitation to spend the holidays with him and his mother (a 'ravishing beauty', warns Waldo) in the south of France. On the Klein's ramshackle farm in the hills of Provence, Jessel experiences the single most important event - or sensation - of his life. The voluptuous and sensual Mrs Klein is a creature whose sexuality and presence leaves Jessel dumbfounded. He is entranced, and senses a magic he has never known before. When, many years later, Waldo disappears leaving no clue to his whereabouts, Jessel's ordered world is overturned once more. If he is ever to know magic again, he must find Waldo, and so he returns to France to confront his past - and, indeed, his future.

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

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

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.

'An extraordinary achievement.' A. S. Byatt John 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

'Our young eponymous heroine, Zepherine Pollack has always considered it her destiny to be a writer, and in the first sentence of the book announces her intention to become ''the unintelligent woman's Iris Murdoch''. ''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. But it is her own gift for word-play, nuance and subtle exposition of the unstated that gives the novel its unique texture.' "Times Literary Supplement"

First published in 1987, The Gooseboy is a tale that is both elegant and grotesque, funny and appalling. Doug and Dulcie Bysshe are twins. Doug - or Bysshe - is now a successful film star living in the south of France and contemplating a new part as a saintly doctor in an African leper colony. Dulcie, busy and energetic, is fighting to retrieve her husband, the mournful and ineffective Pike, who has absconded to Nice with the adolescent Cherrimay Pugh. 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. L. Barker watches shrewdly and judges from a distance, her pithy and particular prose shining through.

'She writes with a precision and an economy of words which had me gasping.' Auberon Waugh

A. L. Barker's engrossing novel looks at the life of a middle-aged storyteller, her fictional world and the individuals who inhabit it. Characters such as Mrs McSweeny and her husband Murdo who receive hallucinatory information about the Second Coming; or Elinor Dunphy, an elegant older woman visited by a beautiful and free-spirited young man who makes veiled sexual overtures to her; or Lalla, a divorcee, who falls in love with her son's form-master, only to learn that his apparent advances to her are just a cover for his passion for her son.

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?

'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. In this novel, vivid and spare, touching and comic, A. L. Barker draws a fine portrait of Almayer and the diverse people she meets and lives among. 'I know nothing of A. L. Barker, except that she writes like an angel and I love her.' Auberon Waugh 'A novel that deserves to be cherished, as A. L. Barker so plainly cherishes her characters. She has a rare ability to illuminate the remarkable qualities of commonplace things, and a profound sympathy for us all, liable as we all are to being knocked over by very little at any time.' New York Magazine

A L Barker's first selection of short stories, Innocents, won the Somerset Maugham award in 1947. Of her short stories, Robert Nye has written, 'stories as carefully composed as poems, quiet and delicate and reserved perhaps, but oddly lingering in the mind.' The eleven stories in her collection No Word of Love - one of her six volumes of short stories being reissued by Faber Finds - are imaginative, concise and intensely evocative. Here she writes about people who, for good or bad, need each other; people in love or in need of love; people growing up and growing old. A L Barker effortlessly draws us into her stories, and those moments when the quirks of the human heart reshape the lives of her characters are engraved on our memory. Praise for A L Barker: 'The freshness of vision that she brings to the often humiliating circumstances in which her characters entrap themselves is matched by the freshness of her style. She is a writer to treasure.' Spectator 'Humane, funny, and written so precisely that the skin tingles.' Cosmopolitan

Edith Trembath's charming inability to cope with problems of everyday life is a constant source of embarrassment to her friends and family. Unwittingly, she provokes friends and enemies alike, and has a disconcerting habit of not finishing what she is saying. When Edith hints that she has an incurable illness and might soon be departing this world, the lives of her acquaintances become even more complicated. Edith's sixteen year old daughter Corinne falls hopelessly in love with her brother Robert; and Edith's husband becomes involved with another woman. It is left to Filmer, the mysterious gardener, to effect a cure for Edith's malady but his sinister methods are unorthodox to say the least. The delicacy of A. L. Barker's style harbours dark shadows of the macabre, the distressing and the bizarre.

'A quirky, bizarre, earthy book...Miss Barker transfixes ordinariness with her arrowed prose.' "Sunday Times"

'She writes with witty undertone, stylish, oblique...like a 1970's Jane Austen.' "The Observer"

'She is formidable, and from a bare corner of human relations gathers a rich harvest.' Adam Mars-Jones First published in 1981, Life Stories includes some of A. L. Barker's earliest fiction (taken from her Somerset Maugham Prize-winning book, Innocents) alongside newer pieces. Conceived as an antidote to conventional autobiography, with what she described as 'all those pages peppered with "I"s', Life Stories consists of fictions based on and recalling the formative events of her writerly life. 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 . . . Underneath there is a firm, ordering imagination and the poise of perfect pitch.' New Statesman 'It would be hard to find anyone who chooses words more exactly or constructs with more precision.' Penelope Fitzgerald 'A. L. Barker writes extraordinarily well, evoking a character or a situation with great economy in a few lines . . . one can only admire the quality of her writing, which makes one want to go on reading.' Auberon Waugh

This collection of nine short stories contains some of A. L. Barker's most powerful and disquieting fiction. 'Noon', about a middle-aged man's unacknowledged trysts with a young girl, memorably expresses the ambivalence and repression which haunts ordinary and respectable lives against the backdrop of a Mediterranean package-holiday hotel; in 'Glory, Glory Allelujah' an aging brother and sister attempt to exorcise the imprisoned hopelessness of their lives in a ritual bonfire in memory of their dead mother; and with stories such as 'Almost an International Incident' and 'Monstra Deliciosa' the author attunes her command of humour and finely wrought levity to display a writing sensibility that alternates between despair and sanguinity to unique, skilful and moving effect. 'She is formidable, and from a bare corner of human relations gathers a rich harvest.' Adam Mars-Jones 'Her glancing, allusive writing carries one along easily, darting from invention to invention . . . Underneath there is a firm, ordering imagination and the poise of perfect pitch.' New Statesman 'It would be hard to find anyone who chooses words more exactly or constructs with more precision.' Penelope Fitzgerald

A. L. 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.

So it is with the decaying actress Delie Rivers, 'vulgar in an eighteen carat way'; Caffery, the farmer turned businessman, who thinks his son 'about as vibrant as raw pastry'; Mrs Eagle, 'her wonderful lassitude', and 'her pale, lumpy legs like porridge'; Mrs Airey who is 'about as deep as an egg-spoon'.

Barker's imagination is acutely discerning as well as descriptive: the chief accountant who has retired after forty years of office routine; the wife who is not married to a dominating man, but who would like to be; the self-contained spinster career woman: what deceptions do they practise to conceal from themselves and others the fact that somehow they have been lost upon the roundabouts?

The Middling: Chapters in the Life of Ellie Toms by A. L. Barker was described by Rebecca West as 'The finest book written by a woman in our time.' As a child, Ellie compulsively lies her way into trouble. How else can she escape the reality of being a railway clerk's daughter in a Crystal Palace villa? She wants to love, but it never seems to work out right. She idealizes a beautiful school friend, only to uncover (with morbid fascination) a strange relationship between her friend and a middle-aged chemist. Her first affair is too good to last. It leads to a pregnancy and an uneasy menage a trois, which finally erupts into brutal vengeance. After fifteen years of struggling with a marriage to the wrong man, Ellie starts drinking. It seems as good an escape as any at first. But it's another mistake. . .

In a parish of wealthy women, Rose Antrobus forms a committee to decide who should benefit from a small bequest left to charity. Secretly she hopes the money will go to the Peachey family - a mother cruelly abandoned and looking after her three young children on a pittance. 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 ... a vacation which, thirty years later, is to provide the solution to her dilemma. 'The dialogue is subtle and the atmosphere of the French visits economically and brilliantly conveyed.' A. S. Byatt

Charles Candy is cantankerous, old fashioned, set in his ways; settled with his wife in a beautiful house in Cornwall, he's also quite content. But all of this changes when his sister-in-law Perry comes to stay. 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. Depicting their burgeoning relationship with both sharp humour and poignant sadness, Barker's first novel once more reveals her incredible grasp of human emotions, as already seen in her short fiction. It's an engaging, enjoyable, hugely skilled debut novel.

A man who can evoke no feeling over his wife's desertion is finally moved to tears of grief over a dying fox; a young boy is uncannily drawn in a devastating depiction of the misdirection of love; 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. The characters in Barker's compelling stories are linked by the profound nature of their emotional ties; her depiction of love and of the complexity of human emotion is second to none. Another startling, assured short story collection from a compelling writer of incredible grace and assurance.

When Gerda Charles says she is the cousin of Robert Dudley, the lover of Queen Elizabeth I, she isn't joking. And for most of the past 500 years she's been trying to find a way to die. Thanks to the help of a big-busted girl called Lalla and the man who narrates this gleefully strange story, it looks like she may well have found a way. Although the narrator isn't very happy about it at all?