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.

In his first collection of short stories, 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.

From the award-winning novelist, 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

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 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 notes Elizabeth left for him to discover after her death), and the forcefully moving undercurrent of history, and biography especially, as nourishment and guide in our current lives.

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 this land of make-believe gradually gets horribly and hilariously out of hand, 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.

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.

In these fourteen brilliant stories, the Man 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. 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 extraordinary collection pulses with the resonance, spark, and poignant humor for which Barnes is justly heralded.

Anyone who loves France (or just feels strongly about it), or has succumbed to the spell of Julian Barnes’s previous books, will be enraptured by this collection of essays on the country and its culture.

Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyperliterate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an
unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Here are the prolific and priapic Simenon, Baudelaire, Sand and Sartre, and several dazzling excursions on the prickly genius of Flaubert. Lively yet discriminating in its enthusiasm,
seemingly infinite in its range of reference, and written in prose as stylish as haute couture, Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy.

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 catalogue 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

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, a rich, witty, revelatory tour of
Belle Epoque Paris, via the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi

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 in England? Answering these questions, Julian
Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives, which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. Our guide
through this world is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, freethinker, 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, Marcel Proust, and 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 Epoque, an illuminating look at the long-standing 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.

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of An Ending, a novel about a young man on the cusp of adulthood and a woman who has long been there, a love story shot through with sheer beauty, profound sadness, and deep truth. 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. One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged nineteen, and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. In the mixed-doubles tournament he’s partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, ironic, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is also a warm companion, their bond immediate. And they soon, inevitably, are lovers. Clinging to each other as though their lives depend on it, they then set up house in London to escape his parents and the abusive Mr. Mcleod. Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed her from a sterile marriage, and how–gradually, relentlessly–everything fell apart, as she succumbed to depression and worse while he struggled to understand the intricacy and depth of the human heart. It’s a piercing account of helpless devotion, and of how memory can confound us and fail us and surprise us (sometimes all at once), of how, as Paul puts it, “first love fixes a life forever.”

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 recipebound 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 his latest novel, Julian Barnes, author of Talking It Over and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, trains his laser-bright prose on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Party leader, is placed on trial for crimes that range from corruption to political murder. Petkanov’s guilt — and the righteousness of his opponents — would seem to be self-evident. But, as brilliantly imagined by Barnes, the trial of this cunning and unrepentant dictator illuminates the shadowy frontier between the rusted myths of the Communist past and a capitalist future in which everything is up for grabs.

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate
the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more
serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt
anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.