About this item
From Man Booker-shortlisted, IMPAC Award-winning author Nicola Barker comes an exuberant, multi-voiced new novel mapping the extraordinary life and legacy of a 19th-century Hindu saintTo the world, he is Sri Ramakrishna--godly avatar, esteemed spiritual master, beloved guru. To Rani Rashmoni, she of low caste and large inheritance, he is the brahmin fated to defy tradition. But to Hriday, his nephew and longtime caretaker, he is just Uncle--maddening, bewildering Uncle, prone to entering trances at the most inconvenient of times, known to sneak out to the forest at midnight to perform dangerous acts of self-effacement, who must be vigilantly safeguarded not only against jealous enemies and devotees with ulterior motives, but also against that most treasured yet insidious of sulfur-rich vegetables: the cauliflower. Rather than puzzling the shards of history and legend together, Barker shatters the mirror again and rearranges the pieces. The result is a biographical novel viewed through a kaleidoscope. Dazzlingly inventive and brilliantly comic, irreverent and mischievous, The Cauliflower delivers us into the divine playfulness of a twenty-first-century literary master.
About the Author
Nicola Barker (born 30 March 1966, Ely, Cambridgeshire, England) is an English novelist and short story writer. Typically she writes about damaged or eccentric people in mundane situations, and has a fondness for bleak, isolated settings. Wide Open and Behindlings are set respectively on the Isle of Sheppey and Canvey Island. Her 2004 novel, Clear, is set in London during David Blaine's Above the Below 44 day fast in London in 2003. Barker's novel Darkmans won the 2008 Hawthornden Prize. Patrick Ness' Guardian review described the book as "phenomenally good" despite it being a "838-page epic with little describable plot, taking place over just a few days and set in...Ashford"
