Bold venture

In 2017’s Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel H(A)PPY, Nicola Barker strewed pages with multicoloured text. The Cauliflower, her joyful previous offering, employed winky-face emoticons while telling the story of a 19th-century Hindu mystic. In her 13th novel I Am Sovereign, huge fonts careen, in the space of an exclamation, into tiny fonts. Bold and underlined text prickles on the page. Barker has many ways of presenting what one of her characters, an estate agent from Llandudno called Avigail, describes as ‘BASTARD WORDS’. And these bastard words are all that the novel’s three protagonists have when trying to distract themselves from their doubts, or break free from what is holding them back.

Charles is a 40-year-old hoarder who believes he has wasted his life and could never ‘get started’. He is selling his mother’s house to settle debts. Avigail, in charge of the sale, was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community but felt constrained by it, only managing to establish relationships in the ‘REAL WORLD’ when she was hospitalised for anorexia; outwardly conventional, she finds it an effort ‘trying so determinedly to be normal’.