From the award-winning author of Clear comes a comic epistolary novel of startling originality and wit.

Reading other people’s letters always provides a guilty pleasure. There’s no such joy for two west Yorkshire policemen. They contemplate twenty-seven letters with the task of solving a crime: the shocking attack, just before Christmas, on a post box in the village of Burley Cross. Exhausted, Sergeant Laurence Everill gives up the task and hands the case over to PC Roger Topping. Topping is submerged into examining the curtain-twitching lives of Jeremy Baverstock, Baxter Thorndyke, the Jonty Weiss-Quinns, Mrs Tirzana Parry, widow, and a splendid array of more weird, wonderful characters, inhabiting a world where everyone’s secrets are worn on their sleeves. Pettiness becomes epic, little is writ large.

From complaints about dog shit to horse-trodden turkeys, from Biblical amateur dramatics and a failing novelist’s fan mail, a chicken that turns out to be a duck and an Auction of Promises that goes staggeringly, horribly wrong a dozen times and more, Nicola Barker’s epistolary novel is one of immense comic range, her characteristic ambition, her shrewd humanity but, above all, about how we laugh at ourselves and fail to see the funny side.

It is unlike anything else Britain’s most consistently surprising writer has written: desperately readable, leaving the reader (if not the policemen) shuddering with mirth – Burley Cross Post Box Theft is a Cranford for today, albeit with a decent dose of Tamiflu, some dodgy sex therapy and a whiff of cheap-smelling vodka.

Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She lives and works in east London.

She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories (1993).

Her first novel Reversed Forecast was published in 1994 and a short novel Small Holdings followed in 1995. A second collection of short stories Heading Inland, for which Nicola received an Arts Council Writers’ Award and the 1997 John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her story ‘Symbiosis’ was filmed and broadcast on BBC2; another story, ‘Dual Balls’, was commissioned for broadcast on Channel 4 and shortlisted for a BAFTA Award.

Her third novel Wide Open won the English-speaking world’s biggest literary award for a single work, the IMPAC Prize. In 2000 she published another short novel, Five Miles from Outer Hope. Her fifth and longest novel, Behindlings, was published by Flamingo in 2002.