Julian Barnes

Tony Webster has always made the very reasonable assumption that he could trust his memories, but when he's forced to revisit his past, everything he believes about himself and his life is challenged. The fact is that Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, never gave much thought to his past at all until his closest childhood friends' return with a vengeance -- one of them from the grave and another maddeningly present. Tony thought he'd left all this uncertainly...

An essay on grief and love for the author's late wife Pat, in which he discusses ballooning, photography, love, and bereavement; putting two things and two people together; and then tearing those things apart.

"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 on Culture and Civilization, 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,...

As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later--one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world's most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife--their fates become inextricably connected. In Arthur & George, Julian Barnes explores the grand...

"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending-a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle ©œpoque 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...

A man becomes haunted by his past and is presented with a mysterious legacy that causes him to re-think his current situation in life.

From Alan Bennett's Baffled at a Bookcase, to Lucy Mangan's Library Rules, famous writers tell us all about how libraries are used and why they're important. Tom Holland writes about libraries in the ancient world, while Seth Godin describes what a library will look like in the future. Lionel Shriver thinks books are the best investment, Hardeep Singh Kohli makes a confession and Julie Myerson remembers how her career began beside the shelves.

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