Barney Norris on writing both plays and novels

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Features

The Vanishing Hours

From the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN comes a powerful, moving, boldly original love story with a difference.

The Vanishing Hours is a rare thing: a book shot through with compassion. Norris is more than a fine writer, he conveys a deep belief in humanity and its place in nature. This dreamlike, winding tale is a joy.

Gripping, humane and funny. The Vanishing Hours is both a stunning work of art, and an extraordinarily important novel for our time.

Sophie Ratcliffe, author of The Lost Properties of Love

A delicate tale of unexpected connection lights up another quiet masterpiece from Barney Norris

A moving and unconventionally wise account of loss and memory and of how redemption works, even for those who resist it most.

Steeped in the powerful idea of personal rebirth through the imaginative engagement in the suffering of others.

'Shot through with compassion . . . this dreamlike, winding tale is a joy.' A. L. KENNEDY 
 'Moving and unconventionally wise.' Guardian 
________________________ 
 
This was how I heard the most important story of my life, the thing that decided me, the story that determined who I was in the end. 
 
As snow begins to fall outside, two strangers meet by chance in a bar. She is trying to make sense of a life shaken by heartbreak and ruined dreams. He is on a desperate quest to find something he lost in his youth. 
 
From the blustery cliffs of Dover to the confines of a nuclear bunker; from the courtroom witness box to the West End stage, he flits from one life to another, never able to stand still. 
 
Extraordinary though his story is, the secret she is keeping is even more surprising, and will take them to a place neither of them - or you - expected. 
 
From the bestselling author of FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN comes this captivating novel about love, abandonment, and the power of stories to help us find our way in the world. 
 
________________________ 
 
What readers are saying: 
 
***** 'I absolutely loved this book - it's beautifully written, very emotional and full of wonderful flights of imagination.' 
***** 'Unlike anything I've read before.' 
***** 'A deeply moving account of fragile memory and lost love.' 
***** 'A completely beautiful book . . . I adored it.'

Turning for Home

The deeply moving second novel from the bestselling and critically acclaimed young author of Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

Courageous . . . memorable . . . so moving that one wonders why as a society we are so much more eager to hear about young love than old . . . it is incidental moments that remain vivid in memory once the book is closed, small glimpses of unsuspected inner lives.

This novel firmly establishes Barney as one of the most insightful and attuned writers of his generation. He negotiates all the huge and hugely important themes - love, family, loss, conflict, pain, the storm-blown paths we all travel - with such grace and absolute empathy. It's a life-affirming, beautiful and achingly poignant book.

Deeply moving . . . readers would do well to make the acquaintance of Barney Norris, who has the potential to become a hugely significant novelist in the decades ahead.

Norris handles his themes – loneliness, regret, reconciliation – with great sensitivity’

Utterly convincing...profound and elegiac

Remember the name Barney Norris. He's a new writer in his mid-twenties, but already outstanding.

Everything he writes about love, loss, grief, desolation and moments of hope and illumination rings absolutely true. It's the real stuff.

Barney Norris is a rare and precious talent

Turning for Home is a resonant portrayal of memory, and Barney Norris a writer of impressive talent.

By turns lyrical and stark, emotionally charged and unflinchingly factual . . . a harrowing tour de force that ends on a redemptive note

The deeply moving second novel from the author of the award-winning FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN. 
 
'Courageous...memorable...moving' - Guardian 
'One of our most exciting young writers' - The Times 
'Life-affirming, beautiful and achingly poignant' - Donal Ryan 
 
'Isn’t the life of any person made up out of the telling of two tales, after all? The whole world makes more sense if you remember that everyone has two lives, their real lives and their dreams, both stories only a tape’s breadth apart from each other, impossibly divided, indivisibly close.' 
 
Every year, Robert's family comes together at a rambling old house to celebrate his birthday. Aunts, uncles, distant cousins - it has been a milestone in their lives for decades. But this year Robert doesn't want to be reminded of what has happened since they last met - and nor, for quite different reasons, does his granddaughter Kate. Neither of them is sure they can face the party. But for both Robert and Kate, it may become the most important gathering of all. 
 
As lyrical and true to life as Norris's critically acclaimed debut Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, which won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, this is a compelling, emotional story of family, human frailty, and the marks that love leaves on us.

Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

A moving literary debut from a prizewinning young writer - a story of the joys and tragedies in everyday lives.

Wonderful…I was hooked from the first page. Barney has the real novelist’s ability to inhabit different characters, and to make the texture of life tangible and compelling. Everything he writes about love, loss, grief, desolation, and moments of hope and illumination rings absolutely true. It’s the real stuff.

Looks well beyond the literary intelligentsia’s world, describing with great humanity five ordinary lives, and coming close, as it does so, to being a “state of the nation” novel – albeit one with none of the bombast the term usually implies…deeply affecting…a tolerant and insightful debut

Barney Norris is a rare and precious talent...a writer-chronicler to be cherished.

Outstanding...a moving, strangely uplifting novel that grapples with the coarse substance of everyday existence and poetically celebrates its passage. Superb.

Extraordinarily involving and perceptive...a picture of a society evoked through its injured members. A most remarkable book.

Norris has a gift for tapping in to ordinary lives and finding the extraordinary in them...emotional, compelling and thought-provoking

Barney Norris’ first novel has the deep emotional power and accuracy of his admired plays, and more: a sweeping study of how, in everyone’s lives, memory and imagination may intersect with chance.

Compelling...Norris never loses sight of the love there is to be found in the world as long as one is willing to seek it out and fight to keep it.

Brilliant and multi-layered...the author has an uncanny ability to capture even the tiniest nuances of each character

Powerful...this young writer is capable of convincing compassion

Norris writes beautifully, unearthing extraordinary depths in the everyday...a memorable writer, mature beyond his years.

Remarkable...makes you thrill to be alive

A Times bestseller 
 
'Wonderful...I was hooked from the first page. It's the real stuff.' - Michael Frayn 
'Deeply affecting' - Guardian 
'Superb' - Mail on Sunday 
'Barney Norris is a rare and precious talent' - Evening Standard 
 
'There exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral. That is the meaning of this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.' 
 
One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide – a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower – all facing their own personal disasters. As one of those lives hangs in the balance, the stories of all five unwind, drawn together by connection and coincidence into a web of love, grief, disenchantment and hope that perfectly represents the joys and tragedies of small town life. 
 
Barney Norris's third novel, The Vanishing Hours, will be published in July 2019.

Barney Norris

Norris hits this universal note squarely and successfully. Undercurrent is a defiantly unfashionable, heartfelt, emotionally vulnerable novel about mothers and sons, letting go of the past and saying what you need to say to your loved ones before it's too late.

A profound meditation on dealing with loss and finding your moorings in destabilising times

Always skilled at creating character and voice... Norris demonstrates how seemingly insignificant moments impact a life.

Beautiful and useful. His writing untangles the knots that tie us down, to families, to history. He writes to free us and deserves our thanks.

Norris is a terrific writer. His characters not only convince, they're invested with a depth of personality that fixes them in the reader's mind long after the book has been replaced on the shelf... Undoubtedly one of the finest novels to come out of these islands this or any year.

Norris's latest novel is a lyrical and affecting examination of love, life and the stories that shape us

A deft novel about a struggling thirtysomething man's chance meeting with a girl he once saved from drowning and the changes the event sets in motion.

A beautiful novel, introspective and thoughtful. Undercurrent washes with a quiet intensity.

Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

Undercurrent is a profound and absorbing story of flux, failures and joys that charts the beautiful, ineffable welter of life itself.

What a beautiful, heartbreaking, wise, triumphant novel. Barney is an extraordinary writer, with a magical ability to reach into the depths of his characters' histories and chart the maps of their lives with grace and love and unstinting empathy. I always feel better about the world and the people in it after reading Barney's work.

Norris is a novelist of such insight and sensitivity that I found myself highlighting entire pages at a time to come back to. Compassionate and unnervingly funny in its depiction of love, grief, family and our points of origin, Undercurrent is a captivating sojourn in another consciousness. I feel like I know these people in real life. Understated but magical; quietly, utterly moving.

Barney Norris has done it again and managed to destroy me with another book. Undercurrent is a powerful and really moving meditation on family and grief, written with all the thoughtfulness and grace I've come to expect from Barney's work.

A novel that, at every moment, chooses to be vulnerable, daring to show as much feeling as it possibly can - all those loves and losses that make up a life.

The best description I have read of ghosts. The process of becoming a spectre. Fragments and glimpses. Scattered memory. I loved it.

A gorgeous, noirish page-turner which also manages to be deeply intelligent. Norris has a remarkable ability to write about love and freedom - his writing shines a light on the way stories shape our lives.

A visceral, beautifully-told, intergenerational story that reaches impossibly beyond the end of life to the first moments of love, through what we inherit from the past, what we may be able to create, and what we leave behind.

Professor Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums

A novel about growing up after you have already grown up. Barney Norris writes with enormous compassion for his characters and the world around them

Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

I read Undercurrent with pleasure and admiration. Gripping and thoroughly absorbing

Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

A perceptive novel about family and how the stories of the past we tell aren't always clear-cut

This tender, thoughtful novel captures the dilemmas of being human - the mundane and momentous things left unsaid, and expectations we can't fulfil.

The heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful novel about finding yourself, from the Times bestselling author of Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

'Lyrical' Daily Mail 
'Beautiful' Spectator 
'Skilled' Financial Times 
'Vulnerable' Guardian 
'Deft' Independent 
'Profound' Observer 
 
'The beginning of summer. Perhaps it crosses my mind even now while I wait for news of Amy that something is coming towards us. Like sighting the first slow swell of a wave.' 
 
Years ago, in an almost accidental moment of heroism, Ed saved Amy from drowning. Now, in his thirties, he finds himself adrift. He's been living in London for years - some of them good - but he's stuck in a relationship he can't move forward, has a job that just pays the bills, and can't shake the sense that life should mean more than this. Perhaps all Ed needs is a moment to pause. To exhale and start anew. And when he meets Amy again by chance, it seems that happiness might not be so far out of reach. But then tragedy overtakes him, and Ed must decide whether to let history and duty define his life, or whether he should push against the tide and write his own story. 
 
Filled with hope and characteristic warmth, Undercurrent is a moving and intimate portrait of love, of life and why we choose to share ours with the people we do.

Barney Norris

Praise for Undercurrent

Norris hits this universal note squarely and successfully. Undercurrent is a defiantly unfashionable, heartfelt, emotionally vulnerable novel about mothers and sons, letting go of the past and saying w ...

A profound meditation on dealing with loss and finding your moorings in destabilising times

Always skilled at creating character and voice... Norris demonstrates how seemingly insignificant moments impact a life.

Norris hits this universal note squarely and successfully. Undercurrent is a defiantly unfashionable, heartfelt, emotionally vulnerable novel about mothers and sons, letting go of the past and saying w ...

A profound meditation on dealing with loss and finding your moorings in destabilising times

Always skilled at creating character and voice... Norris demonstrates how seemingly insignificant moments impact a life.

Norris hits this universal note squarely and successfully. Undercurrent is a defiantly unfashionable, heartfelt, emotionally vulnerable novel about mothers and sons, letting go of the past and saying w ...

A profound meditation on dealing with loss and finding your moorings in destabilising times

Always skilled at creating character and voice... Norris demonstrates how seemingly insignificant moments impact a life.

Books by Barney Norris

Articles featuring Barney Norris

Barney Norris on writing both plays and novels

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