Last year, Nicola Barker swooped in from left field and snapped up one of the biggest literary prizes around, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, for her novel Wide Open. The very words "coming-of-age novel" quite reasonably strike dread into any reader, but if Five Miles from Outer Hope falls into any category it is into that one. For all that, it mostly succeeds in side-stepping the rampant navel gazing and self-conscious cleverness that are typical of that genre - mostly. It is set in 1981 in a semi-derelict art deco hotel on a tiny island off the south coast of Devon and the story centers on 16-year-old Medve and her chaotic, hippie family. For thirtysomething readers, the references will be instantly familiar from Tootsie to Tony Hadley. In her sharp conversational style, she creates a very real world of teenage confusion, the agony of first love and is best on the painful sensitivities between families. Funny and very enjoyable.
