Through the Window

Author(s): Julian Barnes

Essays & Letters

In these seventeen 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, and what it can do. As he writes in his preface, '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.' When his "Letters from London" came out in 1995, the "Financial Times" called him "our best essayist". This wise and deft collection confirms that judgment.


Product Information

From one of Britain's greatest writers comes a brilliant collection of essays on the writers that have meant the most to him

Julian Barnes is the author of eleven novels, including Metroland, Flaubert's Parrot, Arthur & George and most recently The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written three books of short stories, Cross Channel, The Lemon Table and Pulse; and three collections of journalism, Letters from London, Something to Declare and The Pedant in the Kitchen. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. In France he is the only British writer to have won both the Prix Medicis (for Flaubert's Parrot) and the Prix Femina (for Talking it Over). In 2004 he received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and in 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He lives in London.

General Fields

  • : 9780099578581
  • : Vintage
  • : Vintage
  • : 0.248
  • : July 2012
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : December 2012
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Julian Barnes
  • : Paperback
  • : 1112
  • : 828.91408
  • : 288