Zeph

'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

A. L. Barker (1918-2002) was a short story writer and novelist. Born in St Paul's Cray, Kent, she lived in the same milieu where London borders on Kent and Surrey, for the rest of her life. As her Oxford DNB entry says it was 'the chief setting for her work, which often seemed to partake of the quotidian mysteriousness and even abandonment of these areas.' Her 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.' Although a stranger to commercial success, she never wanted for admirers, Jane Gardam, Francis King, Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, John Sutherland, Deborah Moggach, Ronald Blythe, Susan Hill, A. S. Byatt, Adam Mars-Jones, Nina Bawden and Victoria Glendinning being just some of them. A. L. Barker deserves to be better known. Faber Finds is proud to be reissuing her entire oeuvre, six volumes of short stories - Innocents, Novelette with Other Stories, Femina Real, Life Stories, No Words of Love and Element of Doubt - and thirteen novels - Apology for a Hero, A Case Examined, The Joy-Ride and After, Lost Upon the Roundabouts, The Middling, John Brown's Body, Source of Embarrassment, A Heavy Feather, Relative Successes, The Gooseboy, The Woman Who Talked to Herself, Zeph and The Haunt.