Hot off the Press: The Yips by Nicola Barker

Philip Hensher in The Independent wasn’t sure about Nicola Barker’s THE YIPS:

The Yips is a very challenging novel, and perhaps in the end a disappointment – it lacks a crucial degree of refinement and polish in the execution, and sticks too narrowly to a particular tone of voice. It isn’t the first Barker novel that I set down with relief, and picked it up again with a little unwillingness, but it is the first that made me feel that I’d been forced through a difficult and wearing experience without much reward … The problem with the novel is, I think, that it limits itself to so narrow a mode. Almost the whole novel is set as dialogue, and Barker’s dialogue here is extravagantly baroque.

Read all the reviews.

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