I’ve now read 17/20 and am rather behind on my reviews, but here’s the next one for you…
Reversed Forecast by Nicola Barker
The second of my Barker Books reads this summer is her debut novel from 1994. This was a re-read for me and all I could remember was that there’s a greyhound in it – but the cover does rather give that away!
Set in Soho and Hackney, Barker’s debut mainly follows Ruby, from the Soho bookies where she works as a cashier to the dog track in Hackney.
She’s bold, she’s tall. Whe the men on the market call her a Big Girl, and they do, she spits out her tongue. Her short, unruly, badly bleached hair initially distracts attention from her large, red lips and black-lined eyes. (…) her clothes are fashionable but not showy. (This is no place to be showy. Soho is cheap-showy.) She has green eyes and five hooped earrings in each ear. Until recently her nose was pierced too.
Events kick off when Vincent causes trouble in the shop and gets arrested. But somehow Ruby, being a softie was intrigued and takes pity on the homeless man and takes him back to her flat after paying his bail. He will become an unlikely sofa-surfing flatmate, but promises he will repay her. She doesn’t really believe him but
The other main strand involves Samantha and her family, her mother Brera, with whom she is a double-act The Goldhawk Girls. Many of their songs are written by her sister Sylvia. Sylvia is ill; she is allergic to birds; but she loves birds and lets them into her bedroom in the Hackney tower block where they roost and poop all over it – giving the flat a rather ripe aroma. They’re expecting a visit from Steven, who might become their manager.
Ruby has always wanted to race dogs, she works at the kennels at the track weekends when she can. When Don offers her a dog for £900, a bitch called Buttercup, she can’t resist, even though the dog has problems, and she doesn’t have £900. But Vincent comes up with a plan to get Buttercup to chase the hare.
We alternate between the two threads until they converge at the end of the novel, and Sylvia and Ruby in particular wilL have individual reckonings. Barker’s cast of characters, led by Ruby, are a bunch of quirky misfits who need to find out how they all fit together to make up the jigsaw puzzle of life (apologies for that metaphor!), The locations are not glamorous – even the Hackney dog track is a lesser relative of the big one at Walthamstow – you’ll even learn about the strategies in greyhound racing should you be at all interested. Full of life, Barker’s debut novella (creeping in at 193 pages) is a delight and a sign of good things to come.
Source: own copy. First published 1994. 4th Estate paperback, 193 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
