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.
"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
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.
Praise
"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
