Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.<b>Both fun and funny. It is sharp too, in the sense of painful as well as witty... </b>Barnes dissects with tremendous verve and insight this awesome inevitability of death and its impact on the human psyche. He also tears at your heart
New Statesman
A maverick form of family memoir that is mainly an extended reflection on the fear of death and on that great consolation, religious belief...<b> It is entertaining, intriguing, absorbing...</b>an inventive and invigorating slant on what is nowadays called 'life writing'. It took me hours to write this review because each reference to my notes set me off rereading; that is a reviewer's ultimate accolade
- Penelope Lively, Financial Times
A brilliant bible of elegant despair...that most urgent kind of self-help manual: the one you must read before you die
- Tim Adams, Vogue
Intensely fascinating
The Times
<b>An elegant memoir and meditation.</b> A deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter
Garrison Keillor
An essay in the best sense: speculative and precise, intimate and metaphysical, capacious and democratic in the variety of voices, alive and dead, that are invited to counsel the author as he edges his way towards the void
TLS
Intensely serious book of striking elegance: a clever, complicated reverie on last things, so full of ideas as to reveal itself quite slowly, through frequent re-reading
- Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year
A fantastic work of non-fiction, a showcase for his elegantly unfussy sentences and Barnes's ability to burrow to the very bottom of a subject, no matter how daunting
- Colin Waters, The Sunday Herald
Julian Barnes takes on the ambitious subject of death - and succeeds brilliantly
- William Leith, Scotsman
It is a sincere, humble work, punctuated by moments of poignancy
- Colm Farren, The Irish Times