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    Burley Cross Postbox Theft
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    Burley Cross Postbox Theft
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    Burley Cross Postbox Theft
    Audiobook12 hours

    Burley Cross Postbox Theft

    Written by Nicola Barker

    Narrated by Helen Lacey and Gareth Cassidy

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    From the award-winning author of Darkmans comes a comic epistolary novel of startling originality and wit.

    Reading other people’s letters is always a guilty pleasure. But for two West Yorkshire policemen - contemplating a cache of 27 undelivered missives, retrieved from a back alley behind the hairdresser's in Skipton - it's also a job of work. The quaint moorside village of Burley Cross has been plunged into turmoil by the theft of the contents of its postbox, and when PC Roger Topping takes over the case, which his higher-ranking schoolmate Sergeant Laurence Everill has so far failed to crack, his expectations of success are not high.
    Yet Topping's investigation into the curtain-twitching lives of Jeremy Baverstock, Baxter Thorndyke, the Jonty Weiss-Quinns, Mrs Tirza Parry (widow), and a splendid array of other weird and wonderful characters, will not only uncover the dark underbelly of his scenic beat, but also the fundamental strengths of his own character.
    The denizens of Burley Cross inhabit a world where everyone’s secrets are worn on their sleeves, pettiness becomes epic, little is writ large. From complaints about dog shit to passive-aggressive fanmail, from biblical amateur dramatics to an Auction of Promises that goes staggeringly, horribly wrong, Nicola Barker’s epistolary novel is a work of immense comic range. It is also unlike anything she has written before. Brazenly mischievous and irresistibly readable, Burley Cross Postbox Theft is a Cranford for today, albeit with a decent dose of Tamiflu, some dodgy sex-therapy and a whiff of cheap-smelling vodka.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateApr 29, 2010
    ISBN9780007367160
    Unavailable
    Burley Cross Postbox Theft
    Author

    Nicola Barker

    Nicola Barker’s work has been translated into numerous languages, and received great critical acclaim and numerous prizes. Her work includes Love Your Enemies, Wide Open (International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), Clear (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Darkmans (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and The Yips (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize). She was named as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists by in 2005.

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    Reviews for Burley Cross Postbox Theft

    3.5/5

    46 ratings6 reviews

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    • 1/5
      What a waste of good reading time. Awful. A batch of letters stolen from a postbox in a Yorkshire village. The author tries her hand at comedy. It doesn't come off. Every villager a yokel with something to hide. How on earth did this get past the publisher?
    • 3/5
      This is a high 3/5 stars but that's really all I can say. Barker is witty and exceptional at writing and all of her novels have something special about them but I really expected more from this one. It's about a Postbox Theft where all that is left are a series of letters from the small English town of Burley Cross but really it's about the inner workings of a town between the destitute and the desperately romantic, the homeoerotic secret lover spots and the miserly old spinsters...what is interesting is the vastly different takes on the characters of the town from different perspectives. It really makes you wonder what the truth really is about each human being that supposedly exists and resides there and makes you realize how different your point of view on someone may be from someone else and how differently people may think of you.

      This could very easily de-evolve soap opera style if it weren't for Barker's wit and talented prose. Still, it doesn't seem profound or life changing in any way. I still think Darkmans is her best that I've read thus far clearly.
    • 4/5
      A terrible crime has taken place in the quiet, complacent village of Burley Cross. Some vandal has broken into the village postbox, taken out the contents and dumped them in a back alley. The village bobby is handed the bundle of letters - the only available evidence of who might have committed this nefarious deed. As he, and we, read through them, we get a vivid and funny picture of village life - the busybodies, the nosy neighbours, the sweet old ladies and the downshifting city dwellers.Some condemn themselves out of their own unreliable-narrator mouths; for others, you have to wait a few letters for the pieces of the story to fit together. The hinge of the narrative is a long letter which details the village 'auction of promises' - where some villagers donate services to be auctioned for charity, from sprucing up a garden to making a quilt or writing a song. Somehow, in the process, everyone is shown at their best or worst (depending on character).It would be fairly easy to pick holes in this book. The butts of the jokes are often fish in a barrel. There's a surprising number of letters sent considering these days of email. And every single correspondent writes more or less in the style of Nicola Barker - digressive, emotional and emphatic. But you know what? It's a style that I enjoy reading.This book isn't Darkmans. (Alas, what is?) But it's a very lively read. I whipped through it with a grin on my face, and at the end I realised that the village's inhabitants had worked their way into my heart - I really wanted to know what happened to them next! Given the way that hints scattered through the letters were stitched together at the end, though, I do have a certain confidence that the good ones will end happily...
    • 4/5
      I’ve thought about this book for some time after I finished it but haven’t really come to any definite conclusion – do I like this book or do I not? Let me list the pros and cons of this book.PROS-It’s written all in letters. I like that. Brings me back to some of the books I read in high school.-You can get a good perspective of the village of Burley Cross through all those letters.-There are some truly funny moments, such as the ‘sex hex’.-It’s original.-The ending is truly innovative.CONS-All written in letters means sometimes not a lot of background detail is there.-Sometimes some characters don’t really seem to fit in all that well into the overall narrative (such as the church play, who was the person writing the letter and what was their role?)-People don’t really write letters that much nowadays due to email etc. and they don’t always go into extreme detail. (A fairly trivial point though).-The neighbourly arguments can sometimes be a little too close to reality. (Not applicable if you live in Summer Bay or Neighbours).-It gets a little boring in places, trying to work out where all these people fit!There you go. After writing the list, I’ve tempted to lean towards the ‘I like’ list, but you probably won’t feel comfortable reading a book about village life (disputes, love, friendship, planning disputes etc.) if you’re having a neighbour war of your own. On the other hand, it is a witty look at petty politics and worth a laugh, particularly if you’ve ever had any voyeuristic thought about a post box. The characters are over the top (I still shudder thinking of Baxter and his appearance post-sex hex) and cleverly illustrated to display their flaws. There are loving moments and some just plain ridiculous moments (such as the phantom dog dropping bags tied to fences). Like real life, there are some moments that just seem not to do anything or be part of the bigger picture. In retrospect, I found that nice – too often now TV programmes and some books lack any deviation from the Major Plot Line.This book is an eccentric departure from the linear plot and should be enjoyed as such. You’ll either like it (as I ended up doing after I penned my thoughts) or think it’s a load of junk mail.
    • 2/5
      Well, certainly 'different' and quite clever in its idiosyncratic way. But I had so many other books on back burner that I couldn't get round to finishing it. I shouldn't have started this review at all really.
    • 3/5
      I was really keen to read Nicola Barker’s new book. I’ve read three others of hers, (although not her Booker shortlisted chunkster Darkmans yet).In those books I found she has a rare feel for ordinary people’s lives in and around London, capturing lifestyles and dialogue perfectly with great wit. Clear: A Transparent Novel was brilliant. Set during magician David Blaine’s stay in a suspended perspex box near Tower Bridge, it contained this gem close to the start of the book – an amazing simile describing the spectacle and egg-throwing public: "It’s like the embankment is a toilet and Blaine is just the scented rim-block dangling in his disposable plastic container from the bowl at the top."However, her new book, Burley Cross Postbox Theft is a very different kettle of fish and marks new territory for Barker. It’s set in a small Yorkshire village for a start – the sort of place where everybody thinks they know what everybody else is doing, but secrets and misunderstandings abound, and it ends up with nobody actually knowing what each other is doing, if you get my drift! It’s also a crime novel, but with a difference… it’s written entirely in letters – epistolary to use the posh word for it.Someone has broken into Burley Cross’s postbox, (I love the cover by the way), and taken the letters, of which 27 were found behind a hair salon in nearby Skipton. Sergeant Everill at Skipton has failed to crack the case and is passing it back to his old school pal PC Topping at Ilkley. The book then comprises Everill’s letter to Topping telling him about the case, then the 27 recovered letters, then memos and letters from PC Topping closing the case.There is absolutely masses of comedic potential there and we meet a huge array of characters, from the overbearing and sex-mad Baxter Thorndyke, Cllr, to Unity who volunteered to sew a quilt in the village’s totally disastrous Auction of Promises. Then there’s local jobsworth Jeremy Baverstock who is at war with batty widow Tirza Parry over her habit of bagging up other people’s dog poo. He writes (with footnotes) …"Given the idiosyncratic nature of the bags employed (TP prefers a small, pink-tinged, transparent bag (43) – probably better adapted for household use, i.e. freezing meat (44) – instead of the usual, custom-made, matt-black kind (45)) it was easy, from very early on, to understand that the person bagging up and ‘displaying’ these faeces was not only happy, but almost keen to leave some kind of ‘signature’ behind."These are just a few of the denizens of this village in which things don’t go well. The pub is accepting coach parties, the am dram society are searching for Jesus (for their biblical epic), there’s a mad, bad and dangerous to know duck and my favourite, a Congolese woodcarver whose tortured fetish is mistaken for Christ on the cross. Yet as a whole it doesn’t quite work. In these days of email, writing a letter by hand is becoming a rare occurence. Given that most of the addressees and authors were local, you’d probably telephone or go round in person rather than write a very long letter if your email wasn’t working, wouldn’t you? So the letters themselves are contrived of origin. Then there’s the length – it would take me a couple of hours or more to write some of the longer missives by hand. But it was the style of the letters that did frustrate me, as many were a one-sided conversation in nature, complete with digressions, anecdotes, use of the vernacular, and so much gossip, which you wouldn’t expect in letters of these types – for many of them are written in protest at one villager or another’s actions! As we read through the letters, we gradually get to know what’s going on behind the curtains in Burley Cross. It was nigh-on impossible to feel for any of the characters, most of whom were ghastly and profoundly irritating. I was nowhere close to working out whodunnit either, but the trusty PC Topping does, which brings the book to a satisying close. I also felt that the village could have been virtually anywhere – it didn’t feel very ‘Yorkshire’ to me, but I am a Sarf Lunn’ner!This book was extremely ambitious and a little bit too clever for its own good. I did sort of enjoy it and it has grown on me in the days since I finished reading it; as a biting satire on village life it really succeeds. (6.5/10, I requested this book from the publisher. Thank you to 4th Estate)