Books

Elizabeth Finch

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration - always rigorous, always thoughtful. With careful empathy, she guided her students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centres of seriousness.

As a former student unpacks her notebooks and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her passion for reason resonates through the years. Her ideas unlock the philosophies of the past, and explore key events that show us how to make sense of our lives today. And underpinning them all is the story of J - Julian the Apostate, her historical soulmate and fellow challenger to the institutional and monotheistic thinking that has always threatened to divide us.

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The Man in the Red Coat

The Man 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.

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The Only Story

‘Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.’

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The Noise of Time

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 Barnes'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.

Keeping an Eye Open

'Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation.'

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.
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Levels of Life

'You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.'

Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as 'an unparalleled magus of the heart'. This book confirms that opinion. Read More ›

Through the Window

Seventeen essays (and one short story)

As he writes in his preface, '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.' Read More ›

The Sense of an Ending

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2011

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit.

Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. Read More ›

Pulse

Ranging from the domestic to the extraordinary, from the vineyards of Italy to the English seaside in winter, the stories in Pulse resonate and spark.

The stories in Julian Barnes' long-awaited third collection are attuned to rhythms and currents: of the body, of love and sex, illness and death, connections and conversations. Each character is bent to a pulse, propelled on by success and loss, by new beginnings and endings. Read More ›

Nothing to be Frightened of

'I don't believe in God, but I miss him.'

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is like a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers. Read More ›

Arthur & George

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Arthur & George is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes. It is a novel about low crime and high spirituality; guilt and innocence; identity, nationality and race; and thwarted passion. Read More ›

The Lemon Table

A collection of short stories on the nuances of life and its insurmountable end.

From the hairdressing salon where an old man measures out his life in haircuts, to the concert hall where a music lover carries out an obsessive campaign against those who cough in concerts; from the woman who reads elaborate recipes to her sick husband as a substitute for sex, to the woman 'incarcerated' in an old people's home beginning a correspondence with an author that enriches both their lives - all Barnes' characters, in their different ways, square up to death and rage against the dying light. Read More ›

The Pedant in the Kitchen

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. Read More ›

In the Land of Pain

Written by Alphonse Daudet
Edited & Translated by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes's translation of Alphonse Daudet's notes written during his suffering with syphilis. These notes comprise a record—at once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguiling—of both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit. Read More ›

Something to Declare

A collection of essays on the subject of France and French culture written by Barnes over the previous twenty years.

Subjects include the Tour de France, French food, and, of course, Gustave Flaubert. Read More ›

Love, etc

In Talking It Over, Stuart and Oliver fought for the love of Gillian. One of them won, but what happened next?

Love, etc catches up with this trio after ten years only to find more chaos and confusion. Written in the same style as the prequel, Barnes takes the form a few steps further as the characters plead for the reader's attention. Read More ›

England, England

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction

One of Barnes's finest and funniest novels, England, England calls into question the idea of replicas, truth vs. fiction, reality vs. art, nationhood, myth-making, and self-exploration.

As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. Grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. Read More ›

Cross Channel

A collection of short stories that explore the connections, similarities, and differences between England and France.

Clever, wise, reflective and imaginative, these stories are permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations from these islands to cross the Channel. Read More ›

Letters from London

Barnes's first published book of non-fiction.

Barnes served as London correspondent for the New Yorker between 1990-1995, writing a series of essays under the collective title of Letters from London. Gathered here, along with a few essays published elsewhere, this collection constitutes Barnes's first published book of non-fiction. Read More ›

The Porcupine

A startling look at the fallout from the recent transformation of Eastern Europe.

Powerful and unsettling, The Porcupine is a novel about the fall of Communism and the hold it retains on its successors; about the particular uncertainties of politics in our time; and about the stubborn, disturbingly grey areas hidden in any black-and-white vision of the world. Read More ›

Talking It Over

Bright and funny "he said/she said/he said" novel.

Talking it Over is a brilliant and intimate account of love's vicissitudes. It begins as a comedy of misunderstanding, then slowly darkens and deepens, drawing us compellingly into the quagmires of the heart. Read More ›

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Connecting themes of voyage and discovery.

The mixture of fictional and historical narratives provides Barnes the opportunity to question our ideas of history, our interpretation of facts, and our search for answers to explain our interaction and placement within the grand scope of history. Read More ›

Staring at the Sun

The life of Jean Serjeant.

Barnes examines the ordinary life of Jean Serjeant from her childhood in the 1920s through her adulthood to the year 2021. Throughout her life, Jean learns to question the world's idea of truth while she explores the beauty and miracles of everyday life. Read More ›

Flaubert's Parrot

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Barnes's "breakthrough" novel about an English doctor's obsession with Gustave Flaubert and his use of Flaubert's writings to make sense of his own life. Read More ›

Before She Met Me

The novel is gritty, shocking, and quite moving in its portrayal of the slow deterioration of its central character.

Barnes's second book under his own name. Graham Hendrick divorces, remarries, and finds himself consumed with jealousy as he investigates his new wife's former love affairs. Read More ›

Metroland

Winner Somerset Maugham Award for a First Novel

Metroland was Julian Barnes's first novel. It took between 7-8 years to write and draws heavily on his personal experiences growing up in the suburbs of London. Read More ›