Search results for ""author julian barnes""

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Graham Hendrick, an historian, has left his wife Barbara for the vivacious Ann, and is more than pleased with his new life. Until, that is, the day he discovers Ann's celluloid past as a mediocre film actress. Soon Graham is pouncing on old clues, examining her books for inscriptions from past lovers, frequenting cinemas and poring over the bad movies she appeared in. It's not that he blames Anne for having a past before they met, but history has always mattered to him...

Read more less

'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 philosopher brother, 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 a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

Read more less

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011From the hairdessing 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 less

From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes an enthralling set of short stories.No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories spanning several centuries, he takes as his universal theme the British in France; from the last days of a reclusive English composer, the beef consuming 'navvies' labouring on the Paris-Rouen railway to a lonely woman mourning the death of her brother on the battlefields of the Somme.

Read more less

Now a major TV series starring Martin Clunes, Arsher Ali and Art MalikFrom 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 apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. This is 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 differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

Read more less

Alphonse Daudet was a highly popular nineteenth-century French novelist, whose work radiated humour and good cheer. Few knew that for his entire adult life he suffered from syphilis, a disease both unmentionable and incurable at the time. What even fewer realised was that he kept an intimate notebook in which he recorded the development and terrifying effects of the disease. Describing a life in pain, and the sometimes alarming treatments he underwent, Daudet's journal is unique for its comic zest, lucid self-examination and stoicism.Translated by the Booker Prize-winning writer Julian Barnes.

Read more less

'As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads; as poet, I prefer to see them neglected.'Jules Renard was a French literary figure of the late nineteenth century. Not a Parisian but a committed countryman, he was elected mayor in 1904 of the tiny village of Citry-le-Mines in a remote part of northern Burgundy. He had the soul of a rustic bourgeois but the ambition of a metropolitan, and his wife's money allowed him to move in elevated circles, though he seemed an awkward customer, a badger, and looked like one. He wrote fiction, journalism and drama, very successfully, but the Journal is Renard's masterpiece, the least categorizable work of the French fin de siècle.The Journal constitutes a profusion of entries, without stitching or pattern: mordant reflections on style, literature and theatre; portraits of family, friends and the Parisian literary scene; quasi-ethnographical observations on village life and notations of the natural world which are unlike anything except themselves.Samuel Beckett spoke of Renard in the same breath as Proust and Celine, wrote of the Journal that 'for me it is as inexhaustible as Boswell ' and believed his style was learnt from despair. Gide said the Journal was 'not a river but a distillery'. Sartre wrote that 'He invented the literature of silence'. But above all it is a moving and splintery piece of self-scrutiny.Julian Barnes has admired the Journal for many years and has made this new selection from the twelve hundred page Pléiade edition. Theo Cuffe's translation will help bring this fierce judge of human foibles to a new generation of readers.

Read more less

'As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads; as poet, I prefer to see them neglected.'Jules Renard was a French literary figure of the late nineteenth century. Not a Parisian but a committed countryman, he was elected mayor in 1904 of the tiny village of Citry-le-Mines in a remote part of northern Burgundy. He had the soul of a rustic bourgeois but the ambition of a metropolitan, and his wife's money allowed him to move in elevated circles, though he seemed an awkward customer, a badger, and looked like one. He wrote fiction, journalism and drama, very successfully, but the Journal is Renard's masterpiece, the least categorizable work of the French fin de siècle.The Journal constitutes a profusion of entries, without stitching or pattern: mordant reflections on style, literature and theatre; portraits of family, friends and the Parisian literary scene; quasi-ethnographical observations on village life and notations of the natural world which are unlike anything except themselves.Samuel Beckett spoke of Renard in the same breath as Proust and Celine, wrote of the Journal that 'for me it is as inexhaustible as Boswell ' and believed his style was learnt from despair. Gide said the Journal was 'not a river but a distillery'. Sartre wrote that 'He invented the literature of silence'. But above all it is a moving and splintery piece of self-scrutiny.Julian Barnes has admired the Journal for many years and has made this new selection from the twelve hundred page Pléiade edition. Theo Cuffe's translation will help bring this fierce judge of human foibles to a new generation of readers.

Read more less

Selected and Introduced by Booker-Prize winner Julian Barnes'Reading Cheever is a restless pleasure, the work never settles: these brilliant stories make me get up and walk around the room' Anne Enright John Cheever - the 'Chekhov of the suburbs' - forever altered the landscape of contemporary literature. In a career that spanned nearly fifty years, his short stories, often published in the New Yorker, gave voice to the repressed desires and smouldering disappointments of 1950s America as it teetered on the edge of spiritual awakening and sexual liberation in the ensuing decades.Selected for the first time, these satirical, fantastical, sad and transcendent stories show Cheever in all his brilliance and continue to speak directly to the heart of human experience. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

Read more less

A new edition of the Booker Prize winner Penelope Fitzgerald’s best-loved novel of romance in post-war Italy, with a new introduction by Julian Barnes. The Ridolfis are a Florentine family of long lineage and little money. It is 1955, and the family, like its decrepit villa and farm, has seen better days. Only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality. Chiara has set her heart on Salvatore, a young and brilliant doctor who resolved long ago to be emotionally dependent on no one. Faced with this, she calls on her English girlfriend Barney to help her make the impossible match…

Read more less

The story of the title deals with a little boy named Larry and his feelings towards his father. When his father returns home from World War II, Larry is resentful and jealous of losing his mother's undivided attention, and finds himself in a constant struggle to win back her affections.

Read more less

Ford Madox Ford's great masterpiece exploring love and identity during the First World War, in a Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Julian Barnes. A masterly novel of destruction and regeneration, Parade's End follows the story of aristocrat Christopher Tietjens as his world is shattered by the First World War. Tracing the psychological damage inflicted by battle, the collapse of England's secure Edwardian values - embodied in Christopher's wife, the beautiful, cruel socialite Sylvia - and the beginning of a new age, epitomized by the suffragette Valentine Wannop, Parade's End is an elegy for both the war dead and the passing of a way of life.'The finest English novel about the Great War'Malcolm Bradbury'The best novel by a British writer ... It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society'Anthony Burgess'There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them'W.H. Auden'The English prose masterpiece of the time'William Carlos Williams

Read more less