New Releases by Julian Barnes

Imagine an England where all the pubs are quaint, where the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), where the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his merry men really are merry. This is precisely what visionary tycoon, Sir Jack Pitman, seeks to accomplish on the Isle of Wight, a "destination" where tourists can find replicas of Big Ben (half size), Princess Di''s grave, and even Harrod''s (conveniently located inside the tower of London). Martha Cochrane, hired as one of Sir Jack''s resident "no-people," ably assists him in realizing his dream. But when things go awry, Martha develops her own vision of the perfect England. Julian Barnes delights us with a novel that is at once a philosophical inquiry, a burst of mischief, and a moving elegy about authenticity and nationality.

From the best-selling, award-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, a magnetic tale that centers on the presence of a vivid and particular woman, whose loss becomes the occasion for a man’s deeper examination of love, friendship, and biography. "I’ll remember Elizabeth Finch when most other characters I’ve met this year have faded." –John Self, The Times This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class “Culture and Civilisation,” taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages; we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding, yet commanding woman. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil’s grasp, Elizabeth’s application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else does. In Elizabeth Finch, we are treated to everything we cherish in Barnes: his eye for the unorthodox forms love can take between two people, a compelling swerve into nonfictional material (this time, through Neil’s obsessive study of Julian the Apostate, following on notes Elizabeth left for him to discover after her death), and the forcefully moving undercurrent of history, and biography in particular, as nourishment and guide in our current lives.

Moderne klassieker van Julian Barnes, Engelse schrijver van o.a. Alsof het voorbij is; deels een biografisch essay over Gustave Flaubert, deels het (fictieve) verhaal van een obsessieve zoektocht. In ‘Flauberts papegaai’ van Julian Barnes raakt Geoffrey Braithwaite, een ouder wordende arts wiens vrouw is overleden, gefascineerd door het leven en werk van Flaubert en reist regelmatig naar Frankrijk om alle plekken te bezoeken waar de schrijver gewoond en gewerkt heeft. Hij beschrijft zijn bevindingen in een poging te ontdekken wat er nu eigenlijk te weten valt over iemands leven – of het nu dat van Flaubert, van zijn overleden vrouw of van hemzelf is. ‘Flauberts papegaai’ is een briljant en bijzonder geestig hoogtepunt in het oeuvre van Julian Barnes. Het is een roman, het is een biografie van Flaubert, het is literaire kritiek en het is tevens een commentaar op deze drie genres.

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending—a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, told through the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon, Samuel Pozzi. • “A pleasure to read in every way.” —The New York Times Book Review In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days'' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent''s greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people (Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among many others), place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice, and nativism—with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Époque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.

Un hombre evoca un amor de juventud con una mujer madura. Una novela deslumbrante sobre el amor, el dolor y la memoria. «¿Preferirías amar más y sufrir más o amar menos y sufrir menos? Creo que, en definitiva, esa es la única cuestión», reflexiona al inicio de la novela su protagonista. En la década de los sesenta, cuando tenía diecinueve años y regresó de la universidad para pasar el verano en casa de sus padres, Paul se apuntó a un club de tenis en el que conoció a Susan Macleod, de cuarenta y ocho años, casada no muy felizmente y con dos hijas ya mayores. Entre ese joven inexperto en asuntos de amor y sexo y esa mujer madura, ingeniosa, inteligente y que bebe más de la cuenta se inicia una relación que marcará a Paul el resto de su vida. Ahora, muchos años después, él evoca esa aventura juvenil, se confronta con una experiencia que fue crucial e indeleble y rememora los momentos felices, pero también los dolorosos que vinieron después. Siguiendo la estela de la extraordinaria El sentido de un final, con la que ganó el Booker en 2011, Julian Barnes ha escrito otra novela sutil, profunda, demoledora y bellísima sobre los vericuetos del amor y el paso y el poso del tiempo. Si en su juventud el autor fue un maestro de la pirueta, un virtuoso en el manejo de los recursos literarios, en sus obras de madurez mantiene esa pericia con las formas y estructuras narrativas, pero suma a ella una hondura solo al alcance de los escritores verdaderamente grandes. El resultado es una novela que indaga de modo deslumbrante en el placer y el dolor del deseo, en las heridas de las relaciones que dejamos atrás, en cómo el paso de los años nos transforma y en cómo afrontamos nuestro pasado.

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes “a brilliant, rueful look at love—what we do for it, how we experience it and what makes it die” (People). One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, nineteen-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he’s partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, witty, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers. Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how—gradually, relentlessly—everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory—and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another. Poignant, vivid and profound, The Only Story is a searing novel of memory, devotion, and how first love fixes a life forever.

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an extraordinary fictional portrait of the relentlessly fascinating Russian musician and composer Dmitri Shostakovich and a stunning meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society. • “Brilliant…. As elegantly constructed as a concerto.” —NPR 1936: Dmitri Shostakovich, just thirty years old, reckons with the first of three conversations with power that will irrevocably shape his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has suddenly denounced the young composer’s latest opera. Certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, his daughter—all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, he will twice more be swept up by the forces of despotism: coerced into praising the Soviet state at a cultural conference in New York in 1948, and finally bullied into joining the Party in 1960. All the while, he is compelled to constantly weigh the specter of power against the integrity of his music.

An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending. “An engaging and empathetic volume.” —The New York Times Book Review As Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting … But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.” This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin. The seventeen essays gathered here help trace the arc from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism; they are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.

From the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011, an extraordinary true-life tale about a long-forgotten mystery... Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful difference between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain’s greatest writers, a twist on the workshop story and defense of Papa Hemingway, with art, love, ambition mixed in. “Homage to Hemingway” is modeled after the oft-overlooked Ernest Hemingway story “Homage to Switzerland,” a formally experimental work composed of three related vignettes. Here, Barnes composes three portraits of the modern writing life, a rhapsodic, witty and hopeful account of the writer’s search for what is good and what is true. From Barnes’s collection of miscellaneous prose, Through the Window. An eBook short.

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an elegant triptych of history, fiction, and memoir—a "wise, funny, and devastating ... discourse on love and sorrow" (The New York Times Book Review). In this “deeply stirring” book (The Boston Globe), Julian Barnes writes about ballooning and photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and tearing them apart; and enduring after the incomprehensible loss of a loved one. Powerfully rendered, exquisitely crafted in Barnes’s erudite style, this searing work confirms the author as an unparalleled magus of the heart.

Evermore è tratto dalla raccolta Oltremanica.

Après une existence paisible et un divorce sans heurt, Tony vit sa retraite sereinement. Autrefois, il a connu la passion avec Veronica qui l’a quitté pour son ami Adrian. Il a écrit une lettre épouvantable aux deux amoureux, et peu après, Adrian s’est suicidé. Pourquoi Adrian s’est-il tué ? Quarante ans plus tard, le passé resurgit, des souvenirs soigneusement occultés remontent à la surface – Veronica dansant un soir pour Tony, un week-end dérangeant chez ses parents à elle... Et puis, soudain, la lettre d’un notaire, un testament difficile à comprendre et, finalement, la terrible vérité qui bouleversera Tony comme chacun des lecteurs d’Une fille, qui danse.

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes’s wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes—winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending—follows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalog of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed). Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original. “Brilliant. . . . A marvelous literary epiphany.” —Carlos Fuentes, The New York Times Book Review “Barnes’s literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled.” —New Republic

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain’s greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career. • "[A] blissfully intelligent gathering of literary essays." —Financial Times In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, “A Life with Books”), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling’s view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, “Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”

An Everyman''s Library hardcover omnibus edition of two of the Booker Prize-winning author''s earliest and most admired novels, neither of which has been available in hardcover for more than two decades. With full-cloth binding, a silk ribbon marker, a chronology, and a new introduction. Flaubert''s Parrot, Julian Barnes''s breakthrough book—shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984—is the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor who is obsessed with the French author and with tracking down a stuffed parrot that once inspired him. Barnes playfully combines a literary detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is a mix of fictional and historical narratives of voyage and discovery—ranging from a woodworm''s perspective on Noah''s ark to a survivor from the sinking of the Titanic—that question our ideas of history. One of his most inventive works, it was praised by Salman Rushdie as "frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read."

The Pedant''s ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant''s true pedantry emerges. How big, exactly, is a ''lump''? Is a ''slug'' larger than a ''gout''? When does a ''drizzle'' become a downpour? And what is the difference between slicing and chopping?This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes'' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton''s Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes'' legion of admirers will want to miss.

In ''Bark'', Jeanne-Etiene Delacour takes pleasure in the avoidance of any threat to his longevity. Formerly a gourmand and a gambler but now an ascetic, his fastidious new lifestyle is the result of an investment in a public works project - one which holds the promise of considerable reward for the last investor to survive. As he draws black lines through the thirty-nine names in his pocket book, the human capacity to rationalise any indulgence is explored. In ''The Silence'', a composer attests that silence is the logical conclusion to music. He considers the silence that has been in effect throughout the interminable wait for his Eight Symphony, and how it will segue into the silence that will follow the end of his life - a life he claims to have sacrificed on the altar of his art. Part of the Storycuts series, these two stories were previously published in the collection The Lemon Table.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes''s oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers “a remarkably original and subtle book” (The New York Review of Books) about the nature of love and jealousy. At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert''s Parrot.

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending examines longing and loss, friendship and love, the historical past and contemporary life—all with his trademark wit and sharply observant eye—in this extraordinary collection of short stories. A newly divorced man invades his reticent girlfriend''s privacy, only to discover that the information he finds reveals his own callously shallow curiosity. A couple comes together through an illicit cigarette and a song shared over the din of a Chinese restaurant. A widower revisiting the Scottish island he treasured with his wife learns how difficult it is to overcome grief. And scattered throughout, a group of friends gather regularly at dinner parties, perfecting the art of cerebral, sometimes bawdy banter. Each story in this masterful collection pulses with the resonance, spark, and poignant humor for which Barnes is justly heralded.

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, his first collection of short stories explores the vast divide between England and France. • “A witty, playful and ironic writer at the top of his form." —San Francisco Chronicle In this collection, Barnes explores the narrow body of water containing the vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension which lies between England and France with acuity, humor, and compassion. For whether Barnes''s English characters come to France as conquerors or hostages, laborers, athletes, or aesthetes, what they discover, alongside rich food and barbarous sexual and religious practices, is their own ineradicable Englishness. The ten stories that make up Cross Channel introduce us to a plethora of intriguing, original, and sometimes ill-fated characters. Elegantly conceived and seductively written, Cross Channel is further evidence of Barnes''s wizardry.

Conversations with Julian Barnes collects eighteen interviews, conducted over nearly three decades, by journalists and correspondents throughout the world with the author (b. 1946) of such highly praised novels as Flaubert''s Parrot and Arthur & George. The interviews collectively address the entirety of Julian Barnes''s varied works and provide readers the most vivid portrait yet of contexts and influences behind his ten novels, his short stories, and his essays. The interviews focus not only on the author''s fiction but also on his essays, translations, and pseudonymous writings. Barnes''s evolving understanding of the themes developed in his works (history, truth, love, art, and death), his views on the art of the writing process, and the role of authors in contemporary society are also discussed at length.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Sense of an Ending, “an elegant memoir and meditation” (The New York Times Book Review) that grapples with the most natural thing in the world: the fear of death. A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction. If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty and an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for, against, and with God, and at his own bloodline, which has become, following his parents’ death, another realm of mystery. Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.

As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. In this humorous novel, the grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that.

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers a tragicomedy about a successful businessman who wants to undo the results of his former best friend’s betrayal and get his ex-wife back. • “An alarmingly perfect novel.” —The New York Review of Books Shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize, Julian Barnes continues to reinvigorate the novel with his pyrotechnic verbal skill and playful manipulation of plot and character. In Love, etc. he uses all the surprising, sophisticated ingredients of a delightful farce to create a tragicomedy of human frailties and needs. After spending a decade in America as a successful businessman, Stuart returns to London and decides to look up his ex-wife Gillian. Their relationship had ended years before when Stuart’s witty, feckless, former best friend Oliver stole her away. But now Stuart finds that the intervening years have left Oliver’s artistic ambitions in ruins and his relationship with Gillian on less than solid footing. When Stuart begins to suspect that he may be able to undo the results of their betrayal, he resolves to act. Written as an intimate series of crosscutting monologues that allow each character to whisper their secrets and interpretations directly to the reader, Love, etc. is an unsettling examination of confessional culture and a profound reflection on the power of perspective.