Showing results for "Julian Barnes" in Literature & Fiction

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Eine Hommage an die Philosophie. Neil, gescheiterter Schauspieler, Vater und Ehemann, besucht im Abendstudium eine Vorlesung zu Kultur und Zivilisation und ist fasziniert von der stoischen und anspruchsvollen Professorin Elizabeth Finch. Er hat zwar immer wieder Affären, doch prägt das Ringen um ihre Anerkennung sein Leben. Auch nach Beendigung des Studiums bleiben die beiden in Kontakt.

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.

In a collection that is wise, funny, clever and moving, Julian Barnes has created characters whose passions and longings are made all the stronger by the knowledge that, for them, time is almost at an end.

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.

главный герой, Грэм, уходит от жены, потому что влюбился в Энн, но после свадьбы начинает мучаться от чудовищной ревности. Его любовь превращается в настоящую одержимость, а мысли о прошлых любовниках жены не дают ему покоя. Трагедия Грэма выглядит комично—в саркастическом изложении автора он выглядит мелочным и жалким, и мы поневоле начинаем задумываться: кто же всё-таки прав в этом браке? Могут ли такие разные люди достичь счастья? И существует ли выход из конфликта, в котором, казалось бы, они безнадежно увязли?

Introducing Stuart, Gillian and Oliver. One by one they take their turn to speak straight out to the camera - and give their side of a contemporary love triangle. What begins as a comedy of misunderstanding slowly darkens and deepens into a compelling exploration of the quagmires of the heart.