Yet if you ever risk the journey into this most defensive of communities you might be surprised. The landscape is rather sparse, rather windswept, blasted and rather well, beautiful in a melancholy kind of way.

Where else could we cope with meeting the drifter, Ronnie and his potential rescuer, erm, Ronnie. Why argue about the separateness of your soul from your body when you can just keep it in a box? Shouldn’t we all be monitoring motorway bridges and saving our right hand by just using our left one? Hummm, one of the Ronnies isn’t very well I suspect. Don’t let me mistake you into thinking this is somehow coocky and attractive: it isn’t. His oddness will drive you up the wall in the first part of the book simply because his peculiar actions are entirely unaccounted for, no mention is made of them… good heavens, perhaps we should think of his actions as “normal”.

Sara is tough, rough and just about coping. She is full of barriers and gruffness as she survives after the death of her husband on their small holding in Sheppey. We all know people like Sara, in some ways we admire her and in other ways she should be pitied, for cutting off her emotional life will surely curtail her personality in the end.

There seems to be a mass of critics that agree that Barker over-complicates her characterisations and even her plots. I fail to understand this. Her characters are complicated, yes – but they are believable and absorbing entirely due to these “complications”. The plot of Wide Open is really not complicated at all; much of it is pared down to match the landscape. The complications of the plot come at the end where the reader will learn much to explain how these characters came to be the way they are – I would call it complex but fascinating.

My answer is I know not. I don’t know the author and I don’t care much for the question. Ultimately this novel works on a complex level and on a more ethereal dreamy level simultaneously. If the “devices” are in some sense artificial then I did not find this detracting from the work one jot.

Let me share the secret of why Barker chose the title Wide Open with you.

For some inextricable reason it took two years for this novel to win the International Impac Award after it's publication in 1998. I believe there is talk of it being made into a film at some point too. Nicola Barker has a few other books to her name, the most recent being “Five Miles From Outer Hope”.