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In these 14 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.

This is one of the defining novels of English writer Julian Barnes. An entertaining melange of stories starting with a contemporary account of the launch of Noah's Ark takes us into unexpected areas of human foibles, activities, and tendencies.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and 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.

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.

What would happen if a tycoon decided to turn England into a theme park? Before anyone can say "Windsor Castle," replicas of all of the kingdom's great landmarks—from the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey to the National Gallery and everything in between—all turn up in one place. And what if credit-worthy tourists could escape to this island that permits vast expense accounts and prohibits paparazzi? Here is a "wickedly funny" (The New York Times) tale about an idyllic land of make-believe in England that gets horribly and hilariously out of hand.

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the great French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey and his own life.

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 to 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, the society doctor, free-thinker, and man of science with a famously complicated private life....

This novel is based on Arthur Conan Doyle's extraordinary real-life fight for justice. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer, George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age; George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

In these 17 essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner examines British, French, and American writers who have meant most to him, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling's view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is.

Julian Barnes pens 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.

In May 1937, a man in his early 30s 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.

'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.

The Pedant in the Kitchen is a perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook. 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.

One summer in the 60s, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged 19, 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 48, 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.

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes’ 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 his audience 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 21st century (when the absolute truth can be universally accessed).

Артур и Джордж родились в Англии в конце XIX века века, но пути их долгое время не пересекались. Миром Артура был католический Эдинбург, несколько потрепанный, но благородный; Джордж вырос в доме священника в стаффордширской деревушке. Артуру предстояло стать одним из самых знаменитых людей своего времени, Джордж стал юристом в Бирмингеме и был доволен своей скромной участью. Однако начинается новый век, и им предстоит неожиданное знакомство–благодаря событиям, о которых кричали все газеты того времени.

Этот поистине удивительный роман рассказывает нам о жизни Джин - в начале книги она юна и наивна, а Вторая Мировая война закончилась еще недавно, затем мы встречаемся с ней в среднем возрасте и, наконец, в ее столетний юбилей, такой далекий для автора 2020 год. Читателей ждут удивительные рассказы о мире двух солнц и универсальных компьютеров будущего, поразительные повороты сюжета и фирменные афоризмы Барнса, меткие и язвительные.

Barnes’ 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. 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.

The adolescent Christopher and his soul mate, Toni, had sneered at the stifling ennui of Metroland, their cosy patch of suburbia on the Metropolitan line. They had longed for Life to begin - meaning Sex and Freedom - to travel and choose their own clothes. Then Chris, at 30, starts to settle comfortably into bourgeois contentment himself. Luckily, Toni is still around to challenge such backsliding.

In this engaging and erudite essay, critically acclaimed writer Julian Barnes explores what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age and time.