Julian Barnes

In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface), Julian Barnes examines the British, French, and American writers who have shaped his own writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures.

"In this illuminating collection of essays on art, Barnes turns his narrative gifts toward some of the most important paintings in the Western canon, eloquently voicing our reactions to these images--what they cause us to think and feel, and why."

This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about-until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy...