Edith Trembath's charming inability to cope with problems of everyday life is a constant source of embarrassment to her friends and family. Unwittingly, she provokes friends and enemies alike, and has a disconcerting habit of not finishing what she is saying. When Edith hints that she has an incurable illness and might soon be departing this world, the lives of her acquaintances become even more complicated. Edith's sixteen year old daughter Corinne falls hopelessly in love with her brother Robert; and Edith's husband becomes involved with another woman. It is left to Filmer, the mysterious gardener, to effect a cure for Edith's malady but his sinister methods are unorthodox to say the least. The delicacy of A. L. Barker's style harbours dark shadows of the macabre, the distressing and the bizarre. 'A quirky, bizarre, earthy book... Miss Barker transfixes ordinariness with her arrowed prose.' Sunday Times 'She writes with witty undertone, stylish, oblique... like a 1970's Jane Austen.' The Observer

About the Author

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.

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Since its opening in 1991 within the premises of a small model factory at Alnwick Station, Barter Books has grown well beyond original expectations. Starting off in what was the ticket and parcel office of the original Station, the bookshop has expanded down the platforms and through the waiting rooms, until it now covers over one-quarter of the whole Station site. This translates into an area exceeding 8000 square feet and containing over 350,000 books on more than three miles of shelving. Now houses the Famous Writers Mural - 40 feet long by 18 feet high. The bookshop also sells secondhand DVDs, videos and music (CDs, LPs, cassettes, sheet music), as well as a small but growing section of artists' prints. And then there are the shop's many extra features! These include an open fire in the winter, coffee and cookies, a model railway running above the book columns, a mini-cybercafe, generous seating and browsing areas, a children's room, and dozens of glass cases containing many of the more interesting antiquarian books. A final note: during the enlargement process the owners took (and are taking!) particular pleasure in restoring, as they can, various features of the Station. This so far includes the original North Eastern Railway cast iron fireplaces, two of the Station clocks, a drinking fountain, and various waiting rooms. Most dramatic of all, however, was the restoration of part of the glass roof. That was when we all stood about watching as the sun came streaming in for the first time in many years to bring the wonderful old Station visually back to life. The very latest addition has been a forty foot mural celebrating the names of those who worked at Alnwick Station in its railway days - over 400 names plus the coats of arms of the three railway companies involved.

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