Granta acquires Nicola Barker's 'anarchic and hilarious' TonyInterruptor

Granta has snapped up TonyInterruptor, the first novel in six years by Nicola Barker, the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Darkmans (Fourth Estate) and the Goldsmiths Prize-winning H(a)ppy (William Heinemann).

Associate publishing director Jason Arthur acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) to the book on exclusive submission from Matthew Marland at Rogers, Coleridge & White, and the book will be published in August 2025.

"You couldn’t really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events," the synopsis says. "Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract?"

It adds: "As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic masterpiece which traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters’ lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth."

Arthur said: "Nicola Barker is the writer whose work, more than that of any other contemporary author, I return to again and again and again. There is nobody as curious, daring, anarchic and hilarious on the page. And yet for all the anarchy, absurdity and hilarity to be found in her novels, they are also utterly profound and deeply moving."