Julian Barnes

Tony Webster has always made the very reasonable assumption that he could trust his memories, but when he's forced to revisit his past, everything he believes about himself and his life is challenged. The fact is that Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, never gave much thought to his past at all until his closest childhood friends' return with a vengeance -- one of them from the grave and another maddeningly present. Tony thought he'd left all this uncertainly...

A volume of fourteen stories about loss, friendship, and longing includes the tales of a recently divorced real-estate agent who invades a reticent girlfriend's privacy, a couple that meets over an illicit cigarette, and a widower who struggles to let go of grief.

"From the award-winning novelist, a compact narrative that turns on the death of a vivid and particular woman, and becomes the occasion for a man's deeper examination of love, friendship, and biography. This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class on Culture and Civilization, taught not for undergraduates...

Based on his own memories and those of his philosopher brother, a memoir about the author's family offers a meditation on the inevitability of human mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, and an argument for, against, about, and with God.

"An extraordinary collection-- hawk-eyed and understanding-- from the Booker Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life. As Julian Barnes explains: "Flaubert believed that...great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting ... But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is...

Haunted by his past, a man is presented with a diary that causes him to question his life choices.