Talking It Over

by Julian Barnes

Overview

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers “fiction at its best” (The New York Times Book Review) in an unforgettable novel about two best friends and the beautiful woman who comes between them.

First there’s Stuart, stolid, conventional, but not quite so dull as he pretends to be. Then there is Oliver, his glamorous, epigrammatic best friend. And veering wildly between them is Gillian, the cryptic beauty who marries Stuart and then astonishes everyone by falling in love with Oliver. These three are at once the protagonists and the hilariously unreliable “eye-witnesses” of this funny, elegant, and affecting novel by bestselling author Julian Barnes, which reimagines the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679736875
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/27/1992
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	First Vintage Books Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.63(d)

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

"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

"A marvelously entertaining performance . . . with enormous brio and élan.” —The New York Times

“A novel of adultery . . . that is English, obsessive and dangerous. . . . There are all the wonderful aspects of love here: guilt, remorse, terror, denial. . . . Barnes has made talk an art.” —The Washington Post

“It spirals eerily from jaunty high spirits into a deeper, more pensive realm that challenges perceptions of who we are, and how we change. . . . It has a perfectly modulated tone, shrewdly observed characters, and a cunning wisdom.” —Newsday

From the Publisher

The members of a love triangle take turns narrating this ingenious novel from British author Barnes, whose earlier works Metroland and Before She Left Me will also be released in Vintage International editions this October. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Stuart Hughes and Oliver Russell have been friends since childhood. When the fiscally astute but socially inept Stuart meets the beautiful and artistic Gillian Wyatt at a London wine bar, Oliver can hardly believe it. Gillian clearly deserves someone more cultured, more sophisticated--someone more like Oliver himself. Oliver tags along on the couple's first dates, stands as best man at their wedding, and only when it is too late declares his love for his best friend's wife. It's rather like a British version of the film Jules and Jim , he jokes. In fact, the narrative strategy has more in common with TV documentary than prose fiction. The characters are ``talking heads'' who address the reader directly, in three autonomous though interrelated harangues. There is no omniscient narrator to interpret the story; each character is defined entirely by speech. A witty and provocative novel from the author of the masterpiece Flaubert's Parrot ( LJ 4/1/85). Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/91. --Ed ward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Library Journal