The best short stories from perhaps England's finest young female comic writer. 'If her prose style wasn't so devastatingly funny and totally original she might be someone it's fun to hate. As it is, reading her short stories makes you wish you had a best friend just like her... No-one else in England writes like this.' Tatler This selection of Nicola Barker's finest short stories contains work first published in Heading Inland and Love Your Enemies 'Terse, droll, and unsettling tales from a highly idiosyncratic young writer. They share with her novels a conviction that life is stranger than we imagine and perhaps stranger than we can imagine and that only those willing to pursue extreme behavior of one sort or another (or incapable of doing otherwise) are likely to glimpse the true, deeply weird parameters of existence. A 16-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.