The Yips — Nicola Barker

Storm clouds are gathering above the bar of the less-than-exclusive Thistle Hotel.
Stuart Ransom, a jet-setting, supermodel-chasing pro golfer with an extravagant
ego and a career nearing the end of a spectacular decline, is drinking his way
through the night. Desperate for attention, he strikes up free-flowing
conversations with anyone who will listen. But as he banters with Jen, the impish
barmaid with a talent for telling tall tales rivaled only by Stuart's own, the night
takes an extraordinary turn.

Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a tattooist with a mad mother
and a love of anything from the 1940s; a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his
considerably more conservative wife; the mysterious Vicki, the sister of Stuart's
defiant yet curiously devoted manager; and a misguided female vicar of the Church
of England and her husband, Gene, the Thistle's hapless bartender.

They are a highly entertaining and eccentric bunch, but there's more to them than
meets the eye. “There enter in questions of what it is to be consumed by love or
lust, by shame, by the longing to be someone else or nobody” (The Guardian), and
The Yips unites them in an absorbing, exhilarating tour de force.