Julian Barnes

Includes poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why/they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads

The Sense of an Ending

A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen. Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of Britain's greatest mappers of the human heart.

The Only Story

In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return. So begins Julian Barnesâe(tm)s first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage, it is the work of a true master.

The Noise of Time

A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.

Flaubert's Parrot

A follow-up to The Sense of an Ending traces the Man Booker Prize-winning writer's life from the 19th-century events that shaped his world to his transformative experiences with ballooning, photography, love and loss.

Levels of Life

Chronicles the lives of two boys--the son of a Midlands vicar and the creator of the world's most famous detective--as they pursue separate destinies until meeting and forming a remarkable alliance.

Arthur and George

Married to Stuart, Gillian falls in love with his more glamorous best friend, Oliver

Talking it Over

الإحساس بالنهاية

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.

A Novel

Elizabeth Finch

Jerry Batson, qui se définit comme un " accoucheur d'idées ", va en vendre une assez sensationnelle à sir Jack Pitman, un excentrique milliardaire : créer sur l'île de Wight une sorte de gigantesque parc d'attractions rassemblant tout ce qu'il y a de plus typique, de plus connu en Angleterre. Cela va des blanches falaises de Douvres à Manchester United, de Buckingham Palace à Stonehenge, du mausolée de la princesse Diana au théâtre de Shakespeare. Le projet est monstrueux, hautement risqué, et voilà qu'il se révèle être un énorme succès. La copie va-t-elle surpasser l'original ? Et qu'adviendra-t-il si c'est elle que les touristes préfèrent visiter ? Férocement drôle, drôlement impitoyable, impitoyablement au vitriol, voilà un portrait de l'Angleterre comme on n'en avait encore jamais vu.

England, England

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2020* 'An absolute tonic for grey winter days' Evening Standard The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi. In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker - a scientific man with a famously complicated private life. Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. **SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2019**

The Man in the Red Coat

Based on his own memories and those of his philosopher brother, a memoir about the author's family offers a meditation on the inevitability of human mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, and an argument for, against, about, and with God.

Nothing to be Frightened of

Before She Met Me

The characters of Talking It Over--Stuart, his wife Gillian, and his former best friend and his wife's lover, Oliver--return as they continue to discuss the mysteries of human relationships, emotion, and love, in a novel in which the diverse characters speak directly to the reader. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Love, Etc

'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 we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue... It is a rare picture which 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.' Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism. Fully illustrated in colour throughout, Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes' essays on Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud.

Essays on Art

Keeping an Eye Open

Growing up in the sixties, Chris and Toni, face the sexual longings of adolescence, find adulthood in Paris, and return home to join adult society

Metroland

A collection of tales featuring aging characters facing the ends of their lives includes "The Silence," in which a composer longs for companionship, and "Knowing French," in which an octogenarian begins corresponding with an author.

Stories

The Lemon Table

The Pendent in the Kitchen 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. It is a perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss.

Julian Barnes

About

Books

Join the club