Dans les années soixante en Angleterre, quatre copains d'université ambitieux, brillants et impatients de connaître la vraie vie, cherchent chez les écrivains et les philosophes un sens à la vie. Veronica étudie l'espagnol et aime la poésie. Tony, le narrateur, s'éprend d'elle, mais elle lui préférera Adrian, très intelligent et un rien ombrageux. Quarante ans plus tard, alors que Tony, retraité et divorcé, mène une vie terne et tranquille, une lettre inattendue émanant d'un cabinet d'avocats va faire ressurgir le passé. Tony nous embarque pour un long voyage dans le but de comprendre le passé. Mais la mémoire est souvent imparfaite...Ce roman de Julian Barnes a obtenu le Man Booker Prize en 2011.
«Nous vivons à ras de terre, à hauteur d'homme et pourtant - et par conséquent - nous aspirons à nous élever.» Trois altitudes, trois récits qui livrent, autour de Nadar et de Sarah Bernhardt, une réflexion sur l'élévation - celle du corps et de l'esprit par la voie de l'art, par celle de l'amour -, et sur la chute «de la plus grande hauteur» - lorsque survient la mort de l'être aimé. De la légèreté d'esprit jusqu'au deuil impossible qu'il a lui-même affronté, Julian Barnes émeut ici profondément.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 In Talking it Over Gillian and Stuart were married until Oliver - witty, feckless Oliver - stole Gillian away. In Love, etc Julian Barnes revisits the three of them, using the same intimate technique of allowing the characters to speak directly to the reader, to whisper their secrets, to argue for their version of the truth. Darker and deeper than its predecessor, Love, etc is a compelling exploration of contemporary love and its betrayals.
« Au début des années 1990, j'étais correspondant à Londres pour le New Yorker Magazine. C'était un travail excitant et quelque peu étrange : être correspondant étranger dans mon propre pays, jeter un regard neuf sur des coutumes établies et essayer de les expliquer à un public éloigné qui partage la même langue et pourtant peu d'usages communs. Dix ans plus tard, dans le nouveau siècle et le nouveau millénaire, les choses ont changé et pourtant - c'est la Grande-Bretagne - n'ont pas beaucoup changé. Aurions-nous dû être si surpris ? Sans doute pas ; la Grande-Bretagne est un pays profondément conservateur, peu importe qui le dirige. » Julian Barnes.
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn't know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he's proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen. Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of Britain's greatest mappers of the human heart.
Beginning with a stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, this book presents a subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. It features a journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin.
** The Sunday Times Number One bestseller ** A Daily Telegraph / Financial Times / Guardian / Sunday Times / The Times / New Statesman / Observer Book of the Year ''BARNES''S MASTERPIECE.'' - OBSERVER In May 1937 a man in his early thirties 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. So begins Julian Barnes''s first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending . A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage, it is the work of a true master.
Modern fictionShy banker Stuart has trouble with women, until he meets Gillian, and they marry. But Stuart's best friend Oliver is his exact opposite, and it isn't long before their friendship starts to change. 'Scintillating... It's funny, quick on the draw and knows when to soften the gaze. It reads so smoothly, the pages seem to flip themselves' Observer
A collection of stories, in which a divorcee falls in love with a mysterious European waitress; a widower relives a favourite holiday; two writers rehearse familiar arguments; and, a couple bond, fall out and bond again over flowers and vegetable patches.
Un recueil d'essais de Julian Barnes sur les grands artistes français du Romantisme, du Réalisme et jusqu'à l'époque moderne : Géricault, Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Lallotton, braque, Oldenburg, Freud... De très bonne facture, le livre reproduit une oeuvre pour chaque artiste.
Ten short stories that span in setting from the late seventeenth century to the year 2015 explore the unusual relationship between Britain and France and the British experience of France and its people. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.
A novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race; about what we think, what we believe, and what we know.
A family memoir, an exchange with the author's brother (a philosopher), 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.
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 National Treasure Status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, the author considers what fiction is, and what it can do.
This Man Booker Prize-winning novel is now a major motion picture. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about-until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
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.>
Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue... It is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.' Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism.
Fully illustrated in colour throughout, Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes' essays on Gericault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud.
Told against the backdrop of Arthur Conan Doyle's family life - his own passionate affair with the woman who was to become the second Lady Conan Doyle and his wife's lengthy battle with TB - this novel is based on Arthur's extraordinary real-life fight for justice.
