Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

Overview

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes's wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes--author of The Porcupine and Talking It Over--follows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalog of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307797797
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/15/2011
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

January 19, 1946

Place of Birth:

Leicester, England

Education:

Degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford, 1968

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant...a marvelous literary ephemy." -- The New York Times Book Review

Carlos Fuentes

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

From the Publisher