Before She Met Me

$4.99 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Jun 15, 2011 | 9780307797780
Sales rights: US, Opn Mkt (no CAN)
The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers “a remarkably original and subtle book” (The New York Review of Books) about the nature of love and jealousy.

At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert's Parrot.
“An intelligent and addictive entertainment.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Excellent … A remarkably original and subtle book.” —The New York Review of Books

"Julian Barnes [is] one of today's most rewarding writers." —Chicago Tribune

"[Barnes] is not merely a dazzling entertainer ... he 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

"Funny, sad, faintly ominous…making jealousy tangible and dangerous." —Spectator

"Concise and witty about psychology, ideas and love, in all its many forms" —The Times

About

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers “a remarkably original and subtle book” (The New York Review of Books) about the nature of love and jealousy.

At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert's Parrot.

Praise

“An intelligent and addictive entertainment.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Excellent … A remarkably original and subtle book.” —The New York Review of Books

"Julian Barnes [is] one of today's most rewarding writers." —Chicago Tribune

"[Barnes] is not merely a dazzling entertainer ... he 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

"Funny, sad, faintly ominous…making jealousy tangible and dangerous." —Spectator

"Concise and witty about psychology, ideas and love, in all its many forms" —The Times