Submerged

by A.L. Barker

A.L. Barker dissects the unnerving emotions of everyday life with the sly humour and exquisite feel for language that prompted Auberon Waugh to declare that she 'writes like an angel and I love her'. In this, her tenth collection of stories, she unfolds tales of cunning, fancy, and shifting alliances. Here a young boy fosters grand illusions; a wife faces broken promises; a dutiful committee woman meets a sparky old gentleman; a witch is drowned; an intruder insinuates himself into a lonely woman's holiday; and commonplace superstition mingles effortlessly with submerged desire.

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 4, 2002

About the author

Audrey Lilian Barker 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.

Reviews

[Math · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some, I included, of the opinion that a writer of A. L. Barker’s skill should be better known. Regularly published and admired by her peers, sadly mass popularity eluded Barker during her lifetime.

I first came across her work in the Pan Book of Horrors in her slightly incongruous, hauntingly- beautiful story Submerged. In fact, haunting is a fitting adjective for many of Barker’s stories and novelettes, not always in the supernatural sense, although many of Barker’s stories do explore such themes, but in the lingering memory of her characters and the human frailties they portray. Recognisable folk, humorous and dark, fanciful and treacherous, where everyday lives blend with superstition, greed, arrogance and desire.

This is an excellent collection of an equally excellent writer. Barker’s prose is subtle and accomplished, and for all students of writing (no matter what level) the stories Submerged and the Iconoclasts provide a short story masterclass.

[Gary Budden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second collection of A.L Barker short stories I have read in quick succession – she's a writer I'm thrilled to have discovered and I'm finding so much to explore in her work. Dark, bleakly funny stories written in exquisite and precise prose. Highlights from this collection is the long, tragic story, 'Novelette', and the disquieting and subtly horrifying stories 'Submerged' and 'The Iconoclasts'. Highly recommended.

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

i can't finish every book i read