The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending traces the life of a seemingly ordinary woman with an extraordinary disdain for wisdom in this “marvelous literary epiphany” (The New York Times Book Review).
In this wonderfully provocative novel, Barnes follows Jean Serjeant from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, confronting readers 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 twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed).
Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original.
“Brilliant ... a marvelous literary epiphany.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Barnes’s literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled.”—New Republic
"Julian Barnes is one of a handful of innovative English novelists who have succeeded in pulling the English novel out of the provincial rut in which it lay." —Newsday
"Barnes's books ... celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions.... They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: esthetic bliss." —Chicago Sun-Times
"Julian Barnes [is] one of today's most rewarding writers." —Chicago Tribune
"Not merely a dazzling entertainer ... [Barnes] is a no-nonsense moralist as well, and is as dexterous with the darker elements of betrayal and pain as with the farcical mechanics of love and clashing temperaments." —The New Yorker
“One of England’s most interesting and provocative novelists … Barnes display[s] a remarkable versatility, a dashing wit, and a sense of irony that keeps his wonderfully idiosyncratic creations under tight control.” —New Republic
“[Barnes] demonstrates what a fabulous independent voice can accomplish when it keeps kicking away the crutches of contemporary fiction.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
JULIAN BARNES is the author of twenty-four previous books, for which he has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix Médicis and Prix Femina in France, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.
View titles by Julian Barnes
The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending traces the life of a seemingly ordinary woman with an extraordinary disdain for wisdom in this “marvelous literary epiphany” (The New York Times Book Review).
In this wonderfully provocative novel, Barnes follows Jean Serjeant from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, confronting readers 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 twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed).
Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original.
Praise
“Brilliant ... a marvelous literary epiphany.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Barnes’s literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled.”—New Republic
"Julian Barnes is one of a handful of innovative English novelists who have succeeded in pulling the English novel out of the provincial rut in which it lay." —Newsday
"Barnes's books ... celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions.... They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: esthetic bliss." —Chicago Sun-Times
"Julian Barnes [is] one of today's most rewarding writers." —Chicago Tribune
"Not merely a dazzling entertainer ... [Barnes] is a no-nonsense moralist as well, and is as dexterous with the darker elements of betrayal and pain as with the farcical mechanics of love and clashing temperaments." —The New Yorker
“One of England’s most interesting and provocative novelists … Barnes display[s] a remarkable versatility, a dashing wit, and a sense of irony that keeps his wonderfully idiosyncratic creations under tight control.” —New Republic
“[Barnes] demonstrates what a fabulous independent voice can accomplish when it keeps kicking away the crutches of contemporary fiction.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
JULIAN BARNES is the author of twenty-four previous books, for which he has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix Médicis and Prix Femina in France, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.
View titles by Julian Barnes
