En 1903, un suceso notorio sacude la calma de un pueblo de la Inglaterra profunda: varios animales aparecen brutalmente mutilados. LA incompetencia de la policía y el peso de los rumores convierten a George Edalji, el hijo de un vicario parsi, en el principal sospechoso. El caso llegará a los oídos de Arthur Conan Doyle, el creador de Sherlock Holmes, quien tomará el relevo de su personaje para emprender una investigación en busca de una verdad muy escurridiza.
1936: Shostakovich, sólo treinta, teme por su sustento y su vida. Stalin, hasta entonces una figura distante, ha tomado un interés repentino en su trabajo y ha denunciado su última ópera. Ahora, seguro de que será exiliado a Siberia (o, más probablemente, muerto a tiros en el lugar), reflexiona sobre su situación, su historia personal, sus padres, varias mujeres y esposas, sus hijos todos los que están en el equilibrio de su destino. Y aunque un golpe de suerte le impide convertirse en otra víctima del Gran Terror, durante los años venideros se mantendrá bajo el pulgar del despotismo: hecho para representar los valores soviéticos en una conferencia cultural en la ciudad de Nueva York, forzado a unirse El Partido, y obligado, constantemente, a pesar apaciguando a aquellos en el poder contra la integridad de su música. Barnes nos guía elegantemente a través de la trayectoria de la carrera de Shostakovich, al mismo tiempo que ilumina la tumultuosa evolución de la Unión Soviética. El resultado es a la vez un impresionante retrato de un hombre implacablemente fascinante y una brillante meditación sobre el significado del arte y su lugar en la sociedad "- Proporcionado por el editor
?Preferira̕s amar ms̀ y sufrir ms̀ o amar menos y sufrir menos? Creo que, en definitiva, esa es la n︢ica cuestin̤, reflexiona al inicio de la novela su protagonista. En la dčada de los sesenta, cuando tena̕ diecinueve aǫs y regres ̤de la universidad para pasar el verano en casa de sus padres, Paul se apunt ̤a un club de tenis en el que conoci ̤a Susan Macleod, de cuarenta y ocho aǫs, casada no muy felizmente y con dos hijas ya mayores.
Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes's breakthrough book—shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984—is the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor who is obsessed with the French author and with tracking down a stuffed parrot that once inspired him. Barnes playfully combines a literary detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is a mix of fictional and historical narratives of voyage and discovery—ranging from a woodworm's perspective on Noah's ark to a survivor from the sinking of the Titanic—that question our ideas of history.
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain’s greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career. • "[A] blissfully intelligent gathering of literary essays." —Financial Times In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, “A Life with Books”), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, 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, and what it can do. As he writes, “Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”
The updated edition of Julian Barnes' best-loved writing on art, with seven
new exquisite illustrated essays'Flaubert believed that it was impossible to
explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no
words of explanation.
Strange things happen in the countryside. And for bisexual private detective Duffy, this is his strangest case yet. Summoned to a country mansion following an unusual murder, Duffy finds the house awash with potential suspects. Does Vic Crowther, the man who called on Duffy in the first place, have a far more sinister motive up his sleeve? Or perhaps his wife, the ex-page three model, knows more than she's letting on . . .
As Julian Barnes writes in the introduction to his superb translation of Alphonse Daudet’s La Doulou, the mostly forgotten writer nowadays “ate at the top literary table” during his lifetime (1840–1897). Henry James described him as “the happiest novelist” and “the most charming story-teller” of his day. Yet if Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also “a member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French that of literary syphilitics.” In the Land of Pain —notes toward a book never written—is his timelessly resonant response to the disease.In quick, sharp, unflinching strokes of his pen, Daudet wrote about his symptoms (“This is the one-man-band of pain”) and his treatments (“Mor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneath”); about his fears and reflections (“Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit. Be my philosophy, be my science”); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas (“Russians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southerners”); and about the “clever way in which death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.”Given Barnes’s crystalline translation, these notes comprise a record—at once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguiling—of both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit.
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. "You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed..." 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.
Since 1990 Julian Barnes has written a regular ‘Letter from London’ for the New Yorker magazine. These already celebrated pieces cover subjects as diverse as the Lloyd’s insurance disaster, the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, the troubles of the Royal Family and the hapless Nigel Short in his battle with Gary Kasparov in the 1993 World Chess Finals. With an incisive assessment of Salman Rushdie’s plight and an analysis of the implications of being linked to the Continent via the Channel Tunnel, Letters from London provides a vivid and telling portrait of Britain in the Nineties.
