The first full-length novel since the Goldsmiths Prize-winning H(a)ppy from one of Britain's most brilliant, audacious, inventive and hilarious novelists.

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 'Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?' You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract? After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves. As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth.

"Brilliantly over-the-top... There could be no better person to write a comedy about art and its discontents... Barker seems incapable of putting a foot wrong. This is satire that sees right through you, but forgives you and teaches you to forgive yourself. It's that rare thing, a serious work of art that is also a giddy confection: a vehicle of pure delight" - Guardian

"A comic masterpiece... As obtrusive as it is resplendent. It demands to be read" - Telegraph

"One of our most brilliantly eccentric novelists was on top form in this freewheeling farce about the online brouhaha that erupts after a heckler ­disrupts a jazz concert. A fizzy comedy of 21st-century manners coupled with an intimate tale of family strife" - Daily Mail

"A witty, hyperactive satire on art and authenticity... An out-of-the-ordinary author doing what others don't... A metafictional prankster less likely to break the fourth wall so much as bulldoze it" - Observer

"An antic, sometimes frantic dissertation on the way the cultured classes live now" - Times Literary Supplement

"Barker is adept at capturing the paradoxes and absurdities of contemporary life... Barker revels in clever turns of phrase and comic exchanges... [A] witty, gleefully disruptive novel" - Financial Times

"A comic tour de force... Cleverly crafted and almost amorous... [TonyInterruptor] showcases her skill as a comic writer. An eccentricity of expression and a winningly agile approach to plot proves that Barker has a virtuosic command of the haphazard and the apparently arbitrary" - Irish Times

"The zaniest voice in modern English fiction... Nicola Barker is our laureate of the edge. This, her latest dispatch from the periphery, is a brilliant, if bewildering, novel with an eccentric take on the many ways we fail to live our lives honestly" - Literary Review

"Nicola Barker is the kind of novelist to arouse a baffled envy in the reader... An eccentric triumph" - Times Literary Supplement

"Barker is a supreme ironist... She mines plenty of riotous comedy here from the hall of mirrors circus of contemporary digital life" - Daily Mail

"A freeform - and very funny - play on everything from art and authenticity to cancel culture. Fans of Barker's distinctive brand of literary comedy will not be disappointed. Newbies, welcome to the party" - Maria Claire

"Nicola Barker is such a mercurial, capricious novelist that it is sometimes occludes the fact that she is a profoundly serious writer... A joy and a challenge, an irreverence and a gauntlet" - Scotland on Sunday

"Brilliantly interrogates our understanding of the internet, love and truth" - Vogue

"A brilliant story about the struggle for authenticity in the digital age" - Elle