Julian Barnes, página 4 de 11

With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.

From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes an enthralling set of short stories. No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes.

The Pedant s ambition is simple He wants to cook tasty nutritious food he wants not to poison his friends and he wants to expand slowly and with pleasure his culinary repertoire A stern critic of himself and others he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes although he might in a burst of enthusiasm increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient Rather he is a recipe bound follower of the instructions of others It is in his interrogations of these recipes and of those who create them that the Pedant s true pedantry emerges How big exactly is a lump Is a slug larger than a gout When does a drizzle become a downpour And what is the difference between slicing and chopping This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes search for gastronomic precision It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson infuriated by Nigel Slater and reassured by Mrs Beeton s Victorian virtues The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes legion of admirers will want to miss

n the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker - a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life. Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is at once a fresh and original portrait of the Belle Epoque - its heroes and villains, its writers, artists and thinkers - and a life of a man ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, the new book from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive.

In this powerfully affecting Flaubert''s Parrot gives readers a brilliant take on the deceptions that make up the quivering substrata of erotic love. "An interplay of serious thought and dazzling wit. . . . It''s moving, it''s funny, it''s frightening . . . fiction at its best."New York Times Book Review.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. In Levels of Life Julian Barnes gives us Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and aerial photographer; he gives us Colonel Fred Burnaby, reluctant adorer of the extravagant Sarah Bernhardt; then, finally, he gives us the story of his own grief, unflinchingly observed. This is a book of intense honesty and insight; it is at once a celebration of love and a profound examination of sorrow.

Un premier amour détermine une vie pour toujours : c’est ce que j’ai découvert au fil des ans. Il n’occupe pas forcément un rang supérieur à celui des amours ultérieures, mais elles seront toujours a

This is a collection of ten short stories with a linking theme: the British in France through several centuries. It opens with a group of mercenary soldiers engaged in a punitive expedition against a Protestant village in southern France in the late seventeenth century, and closes with a journey on the antiquated Eurostar express to Paris in the year 2015. In between the British appear in their various guises: as railway-builders in the 1840s, vineyard-owners at the turn of the century, artistic exiles in the 1920s. There is a story (based upon fact) about the departure of an English cricket team to play the Gentlemen of France in 1789; one about a literary conference in the Massif Central which may or may not have taken place; one about a Tour de France cyclist. The stories are designed to play off one another and work exploring the British fascination with France, our various and mixed reasons for being there, and our sometimes ambiguous reception.

There used to be two sides to every story. Now there are three...In "Talking It Over", Gillian and Stuart were married until Oliver - witty, feckless Oliver - stole Gillian away. In "Love, etc", Jillian 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. 'The triange of deeply believable characters and the story of betrayal and ...

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchan

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011From the hairdessing salon where an old man measures out his life in haircuts, to the concert hall where a music lover carries out an obsessive campaign