ABOUT
THE BOOK

Wide Open is word perfect, witty and ironic…..The author’s focus on marginal lives and on the importance of the dispossesed and the apparently mad persuade us finally that Wide Open possesses a manic energy and taut eloquence worthy of a large, serious and global readership.

Fifty miles to the south and east of London, poking out into the estuary of the river Thames, the Isle of Sheppey is a forgotten, misty backwater. There’s a prison, some wading birds and a small nudist beach. In front of this salty, blasted backdrop, Nicola Barker conjures up an imaginative landscape of breathtaking scope and audacity.