TonyInterruptor | Granta

  • Published: 14/08/2025
  • ISBN: 9781803512556
  • Granta Books
  • pages

TonyInterruptor

Nicola Barker

‘Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?’

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. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract?

After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves.

As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic masterpiece that 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.

'An anarchic and lovingly perverse writer'

Ali Smith

'I think Nicola Barker is incapable of a dull page. Her work...is unified by its spirit of adventure, and by the drive of ambition behind each new, splendidly batty project'

Kevin Barry

'Nicola Barker's wildness and capacity for the absurd often delight me'

Sarah Moss

Nicola Barker on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 164

TonyInterruptor

Nicola Barker

‘Insofar as value for money is relevant to art, that audience – an attentive audience, a great audience – were determined to get it.’

Fiction by Nicola Barker.

Fiction | Granta 164

Go, Local Sports Team, Go!

Nicola Barker

‘This is his Toxic Super-Ego at work. Surely?’

Fiction | Granta 164

The Farm

Nicola Barker

‘Yes. Oh yes. That is who we once were. The Young must never, ever allow themselves to ignore what has brought them here.’