Best of 2025_1

Podcast

What were the best books of 2025?

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9 Vintage Paperback Novels to Add to Your Summer TBR Pile

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Features

The best Penguin Podcast episodes for aspiring writers

A black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes, on the left, next to a large green arrow towards a flatlay of his book covers

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Where to start reading Julian Barnes

There are many books that depict the permutations of growing older

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The best books that celebrate old age

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7 riveting novels on battles for power

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Interviews

The Vintage Podcast special: Julian Barnes and Suzanne Dean

The Sense of an Ending

It is a monumental novel capturing the struggle of art and the artist under the hand of totalitarianism.

Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and five works of non-fiction, including Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Légion d'honneur in 2017.

We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. 
 
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, Tony Webster and Adrian Finn swore to stay friends for life. Now in middle age, a lawyer’s letter proves that Tony’s memory may be imperfect. The story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past, The Sense of an Ending is laced with Julian Barnes’ trademark precision, dexterity and insight, and won him the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011. 
 
‘A precise, poignant portrait of the costs and benefits of time passing, of friendship, of love. A small masterpiece’ Erica Wagner, The Times

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. 
 
From the Titanic to the Amazon, the raft of the Medusa to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is no ordinary history, but something stranger: a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. 
 
'Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising, and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss’ Nadime Gordimer

Flaubert's Parrot

Barnes manages to be erudite but extremely funny too… You never know what Barnes is going to do next and I admire that.’

Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in

A gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!

Endless food for thought, beautifully written... A tour de force

A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny

Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in!

Julian Barnes' wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks Flaubert made on a forgetting world. The writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny, and among the best prose I have read in years

A delight... Handsomely the best novel published in England in 1984

A dazzling achievement...remarkably inventive as well as audacious

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. 
 
As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself. 
 
A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour-de-force of seductive originality. 
 
‘Unputdownable... A mesmeric original’ Philip Larkin 
 
‘Delightful and enriching...a book to revel in!’ Joseph Heller 
 
‘A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny’ Sunday Times 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR TO MARK THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PUBLICATION

Elizabeth Finch

[Barnes] is always clever, often original and unusually funny... Elizabeth Finch...offers plenty to chew on...with barely a sentence in it that doesn't have some nutritional value.

Everything Barnes writes changes everything... Barnes's latest novel, must be read at least twice for the full force of its voltage to be felt... A cryptic crossword of a novel, Elizabeth Finch is a tricksier and even brainier version of Flaubert's Parrot.

The book's central and most enthralling section...deals with a figure EF esteemed as a kindred spirit: Julian the Apostate... A bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition... [Elizabeth Finch] also celebrates the cast of mind Barnes most prizes. A connoisseur and master of irony himself, he fills this book with instances of its exhilarating power.

Elizabeth Finch ranks alongside Barnes' best.

A new novel from Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes is always a literary event, and Elizabeth Finch...is not different. Wistful, thought-provoking stuff.

This is...Julian Barnes...in his best ambitious high concept mode, serious and playful at once.

A surprisingly compelling novel... a thought-provoking book that plays with the relationship between author and reader.

The Sunday Times Bestseller from the Winner of the Booker Prize 
 
She will change the way you see the world . . . 
 
'I'll remember Elizabeth Finch when most other characters I've met this year have faded' The Times 
 
Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration. Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class. Tasked with unpacking her notebooks after her death, Neil encounters once again Elizabeth's astonishing ideas on the past and on how to make sense of the present. 
 
But Elizabeth was much more than a scholar. Her secrets are waiting to be revealed . . . and will change Neil's view of the world forever. 
 
'Enthralling . . . A connoisseur and master of irony himself, [Barnes] fills this book with instances of its exhilarating power' Sunday Times 
 
'A lyrical, thoughtful and intriguing exploration of love, grief and the collective myths of history' Booklist

The Man in the Red Coat

Britain’s most passionate Francophile takes us on a wonderfully rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi

What a deliciously intelligent entertainment this is, couched in a prose of enviable suppleness… a master is at work here.

One of his best books, very handsomely published too… [The Man in the Red Coat is] a bravura performance, highly entertaining.

Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way… punctuated by the sound of gunshot…[this is a] brilliant, defiantly unconventional book.

The Belle Époque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed with top fin-de-siècle tittle-tattle.

Julian Barnes’s wonderful The Man in the Red Coat surges round Belle Epoque Paris… a story full of digressions, white peacocks, missing limbs, amusing adverbs and fantastic clothes. An absolute tonic for grey winter days.

Fascinating history, biography and philosophy rolled into one. In The Man in the Red Coat, Barnes is the ideal guide to…a delightful amble through La Belle Epoque… a riveting dissection of an era.

This elegant, seductive history is a book best read in the spirit of its times. The Man In The Red Coat is less a lesson than a day-dream of France’s golden heyday. Wrap yourself in a Japanese tea gown, languish on a peacock-print sofa and abandon yourself to fin-de-siècle Paris and the ministrations of Doctor Love.

As with his masterpiece, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), [Barnes’] new book [The Man in the Red Coat] seems different from anything ever written before.

This lavish study of society surgeon Samuel de Pozzi invites us into a world of artists, libertines and medical innovation… [it’s] enjoyably obsessive...biographical detective work.

Belle-Epoque Paris comes alive in this biography of a pioneering French doctor, Samuel Jean Pozzi... Barnes, the author of The Sense of an Ending, sketches his subject's life in fascinating detail, including entanglements with Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt.

Witty, gossipy and erudite, Julian Barnes brilliantly tells the story of an era through the eyes of a man who knew the writers, thinkers, aristocrats and actors of the day.

Marvellously rich and thought-provoking.

I was enchanted by Julian Barnes’s splendid tour d’horizon of belle époque society, of its art and literature. His book (The Man in the Red Coat) brought back memories of authors read long ago and and opened up promises of paths yet to be explored.

Barnes is an urbane and cultured guide, weaving his commentary on art, literature and philosophy into a fluid narrative while exposing the seams of a society preoccupied with reputation to a deadly degree… This is the story of an era so dizzying and fantastical that it seems like fiction, even in Barnes’ impeccably researched retelling.

[In] this beguiling hybrid of a book…[Barnes] knit[s] his patchwork of stories together with all the suturing skill of Dr Pozzi, that fast-fingered virtuoso of the catgut or silver-wire stitch… [A] richly textured portrait of Pozzi and his friends.

Barnes shapes...rich material into a compelling tale of collaborations, innovation and excess.

[Barnes] liberates us from the shallowness of our absorption in the present, and reminds us that we always know less than we think about what we’re doing.

Barnes is as freewheeling in his painting of a hedonistic period as Pozzi was free-thinking - and presents it as a mirror to our own "hysterical" age.

[The Man in the Red Coat is] top international tittle-tattle… sparkling and very enjoyable.

[A] richly illustrated, witty and detailed tour d’horizon of the belle époque period… Julian Barnes conveys all the joie de vivre and the decadence of the period as well as the rich array of intellectual and artistic life shared between France and Britain… a book that should fascinate many a Francophile.

A masterful portrayal of the Belle Epoque.

A personal meditation on the belle époque… The Man in the Red Coat is one long, meandering essay in Montaigne mode.

The book is at once a biography of Pozzi in the context of his time and a picture of the time as refracted by Pozzi. Barnes constructs it as a kind of mosaic.

I’ve just started Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat, and I am already hooked.

A tour de force… Dr Pozzi may not be remembered in medical history but his legacy is an artwork of himself in his prime that has transcended time.

Steeped in the luxury and scandal of Belle Epoque Paris and London, Barnes resurrects the charming, philandering Pozzi.

Royal Academy Magazine *10 novels about art you won't put down*

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2020* 
 
'A bravura performance, highly entertaining' Evening Standard 
 
The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi. 
 
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker - a scientific man with a famously complicated private life. 
 
Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. 
 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2019**

Essays on Art (Updated Edition)

Keeping an Eye Open

An updated edition of the highly acclaimed collection of writing on art by one of Britain’s best-loved authors, with seven new illustrated essays.

[A] beautifully produced and judiciously illustrated collection.

The essay on Lucian Freud...is completely brilliant. I feel uplifted by it... It is a wonderful book.

I became entirely mesmerised by Barnes’ prose… Keeping an Eye Open is a rich and thoughtful book that should not be rushed. These essays are too full of chiaroscuro, their flashes of illumination too fascinating, their connections too interesting for a cursory reading.

It’s a readable, riveting, informed work with sharp, marvelous anecdotes and observations. In this beautifully illustrated book you’re in great company. Barnes is a sane and steady guide… Wonderful stuff.

Extremely rewarding, informative, attentive, thoughtful, entertaining essays.

This is an erudite, entertaining and highly personal collection of essays from the Booker Prize-winning novelist.

For their insights all these essays are worth reading.

Barnes’s essays abound in verbal images that are pictorially vivid.

This magnificent survey draws its strength from its intensely personal focus, each piece reverberating off others despite the long span of their composition. It’s a stream of thinking, over years, rather than a set of disparate essays… [A] fascinating and brilliant book.

The pieces show Barnes to be a sympathetic and enthusiastic critic, with a tremendous ability to convey the visceral impact of a painting.

A brilliant collection of essays by the novelist.

[An] always entertaining and enlightening collection.

If only all art writing were as good as this.

Barnes weaves biography, history, philosophy [together] in this fascinating, richly illuminating and beautifully written book.

Hard not to see this being my book of the year.

There’s no hint of pretentiousness here, so why not revel in Barnes’ wit and arch insight.

In Keeping an Eye Open [Barnes] proves to be a thoughtful observer of art, and a keen student of its history.

[Barnes] is bold, acerbic and free from phony reverence. He is also genuinely fascinated by visual art in itself and not as a prompt for flights of prosodic fancy. The pieces are replete with unashamed pleasure in looking and teasing out connections.

Fully illustrated in colour throughout, this is a fascinating and insightful look into the world of art from Romanticism to Realism.

The essays are not just novel in form but clear and even elegantly written.

Combining what is clearly a life-long love of art with an admirable depth of knowledge, Barnes brings a novelist’s eye to the gallery wall and, with this, a fresh, accessible approach to the stories being told in each painting.

Thought-provoking, beautifully presented, tender.

Barnes has a wonderful eye for what makes a good picture, and a command of language that again and again allows readers to share what he sees.

Well-informed and deeply admiring, but never didactic.

[It] gave me a new confidence in how to engage with, understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.

For those…insecure when viewing art, not always sure how to decode it or emotionally engage with it, this offers a lifeline…Utterly compelling.

A typically elegant ad absorbing book by one of t great contemporary English Writers, and with strong Gallic undertones – a wonderful set of essays about artists, many of them French, covering the period from Romanticism through to modernism.

Opinionated, enthusiastic, witty and beautifully written.

Julian Barnes is best known for his fiction...but he's also an excellent art writer... Peppered with personal insights and select historical detail, each piece is as engaging as the next

The updated edition of Julian Barnes’ best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays 
 
‘Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue... It is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.’ 
 
Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism. 
 
Fully illustrated in colour throughout, Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes’ essays on Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Morisot, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Cassatt, Redon, Van Gogh, the legendary critic Huysmans, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud. It also offers new perspectives on the fruitful relationship between writers and artists, and on the rivalry among Russian collectors of French art in the late 19th century. 
 
‘A typically elegant and absorbing book by one of the greatest contemporary English writers.’ Guardian *Books of the Year* 
‘Gave me a new confidence in how to understand and, more importantly, enjoy wandering around an exhibition.’ Mariella Frostrup 
‘My book of the year.’ Natalie Haynes, Independent

The Pedant in the Kitchen

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. 
 
It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant's true pedantry emerges. How big, exactly, is a 'lump'? Is a 'slug' larger than a 'gout'? When does a 'drizzle' become a downpour? And what is the difference between slicing and chopping?This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton's Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss. 
 
© Julian Barnes 2003 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. 
 
It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant's true pedantry emerges. How big, exactly, is a 'lump'? Is a 'slug' larger than a 'gout'? When does a 'drizzle' become a downpour? And what is the difference between slicing and chopping?This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton's Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss.

The Only Story

A profoundly moving story of first love and memory from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending

A novelist at the height of his powers ... Quietly devastating.

Emotionally acute, profoundly beautiful, as droll as it is deep... this has to be one of the smartest novels that 2018 has to offer.

A gentle, bleak, and brilliant novel.

This intense, taut, sad and often beautiful tale may well be Barnes’ best novel for years.

As quiet and aching and intimate as a James Blake ballad.

A sensitive look at what makes lovers tick.

A vivid dramatization of the narcissism of obsessive love.

Barnes writes with shattering emotional acuity. The moments of pure devastation pile up, the story crushing with increasing weight as it unfurls.

An utterly devastating masterpiece of a novel.

At once understated and dazzling. Which perhaps sums [Barnes] up, the dazzle lying not in the shimmer of individual sentences so much as in the curves and vaults of his structural decisions.

A quietly harrowing novel about the complexity of love and the slipperiness of memory.

Distils some of the pandemonium, and intergenerational conflict, of our own uncertain time.

Barnes gives us a novel that asks the profoundest questions about memory, love and human existence.

What begins as a witty tale of rebellion against bourgeois norms becomes a moving meditation on love. Once again Barnes shows off his skill at getting to the heart of a human heart.

Deeply affecting and profoundly philosophical, The Only Story is a novel by an author at the height of his technical powers.

Barnes' knowing combination of humour and seriousness makes [The Only Story] ... a persuasive universal romance.

A beautiful, tragic and poignant novel.

In this year’s hottest new releases.

Tender, wise and beautifully written, this is sad and deeply moving stuff from Barnes. Highly recommended.

A brave and expansive work, compellingly told.

A thoroughly rewarding book – a compassionate, touching and funny account… A profound book, it compels one to think about one’s own life.

Moving, funny, with ingenious emotional intelligence, it’s one to read and read again.

A devastatingly emotional and insightful novel.

Barnes’s novel chronicles their romance with an austere tenderness

[Barnes’s] facility for writing artfully conceived and executed novels about unfulfilled, disappointed lives has risen to almost unassailable heights.

Julian Barnes writes shockingly well about emotion… The Only Story is devastating and wonderful.

A solemn-ish meditation on the fallibility of memory… A love story – bitter and sweet in parts – unfurls.

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. 
 
First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. 
 
As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen. 
 
Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of Britain's greatest mappers of the human heart.

Vintage Minis

Death

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

Both fun and funny. It is sharp too, in the sense of painful as well as witty... Barnes dissects with tremendous verve and insight this awesome inevitability of death and its impact on the human psyche. He also tears at your heart

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

When it comes to death, is there ever a best case scenario? In this disarmingly witty book, Julian Barnes confronts our unending obsession with the end. He reflects on what it means to miss God, whether death can be good for our careers and why we eventually turn into our parents. Barnes is the perfect guide to the weirdness of the only thing that binds us all. 
 
Selected from the book Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Calm by Tim Parks 
Drinking by John Cheever 
Babies by Anne Enright 
Psychedelics by Aldous Huxley

The Noise of Time

A compelling novel about art and power, courage and cowardice from the Booker-winning author of The Sense of An Ending

A great novel, Barnes’s masterpiece… Exquisite, intimate detail. He has given us a novel that is powerfully affecting, a condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man’s conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism.

Barnes’s sombre, brilliant new novel opens with a scene like something from a story by Chekhov… Gleaming with intelligence and literary flair, this elegantly composed fictional meditation offers a fresh gloss on a musical genius’s collisions and collusions with power.

[Barnes is] a master of the narrative sidestep… Not just a novel about music, but something more like a musical novel… The story itself is structured in three parts that come together like a broken chord. It is a simple but brilliant device, and one that goes right to the heart of this novel.

A compelling novel about art and power, courage and cowardice, and the capriciousness of fate…Barnes brilliantly captures the composer’s conflicted state of mind…This book is only 190 pages long, but it packs an extraordinary emotional punch.

The writing in the early pages is magnificent… The reader has the confidence of being in the hands of a master storyteller… Barnes has a good sense of what life was like in the Soviet Union. He captures well the black humor, irony and cynicism.

Julian Barnes’ novel deftly evokes the complexity of Shostakovich’s relationship with Stalin and the power of his oeuvre… Thick with period detail… The book returns us to the music itself, that immense 20th-century oeuvre that contains everything but confirms nothing.

Gripping… An intimately illuminating montage of Shostakovich’s life… Immediately engaging.

A novel of deceptive slenderness... You expect nothing less from a writer soaked in Flaubert.

A series of elegant insights into the mind of a brilliant artist… Throughout, Barnes offers a surety of touch that few writers can match.

[A] sad, self-lacerating and darkly funny hybrid of a novel. The Noise of Time is both a burrowing meditation on an artist’s lifelong relationship with totalitarian power, fear and compromise, and a fascinating fictional biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest composers… Barnes is a master.

A profound meditation on power and the relationship of art and power… It presents a life, and refrains from judgment. It is a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding… I don’t think [Barnes] has written a finer, more truthful or more profound book.

The skilled novelist here brings alive not just the political turmoil that surrounded Shostakovich, but his love for his wives, his love for his children, a vivid counterpoint of artistic freedom and political oppression – the eloquent conjuring of one glass of vodka clinking against another.

This is a slim novel about the big things: art, fear, Power…history’s farcical, tragic repetitions.  It is also quite excellent.

Julian Barnes takes an Orwellian turn for his first novel since winning the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

The Noise of Time looks to enthral us with its tale of compromise, cowardice and courage in Stalinist Russia.

It is being hailed as his best novel yet.

An imagining of Shostakovich’s life, art, power and politics.

One for fans of literary fiction and Barnes too.

[It is] reflective, smart and eminently readable.

Set to enthral us with its tale of compromise, cowardice and courage… Pick it up as soon as you can.

Moving and often genuinely tense—as well as richly informative.

[It is] full of playful wit and understatement… A very short book but it contains more to enjoy and chew over than most novels three times its length.

But The Noise of Time shares with Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata - another text which has at its centre the tyranny of music and its physiologically devastating potential – the capacity for evocation of music-making that is worthy of the real thing.

A brilliant portrait of an artist trying not to sign away his soul.

At his thought-provoking best… A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage. It is the work of a master.

[The Noise of Time is] disturbing, darkly comical and an ideal intellectual palate-cleanser to kick off the new year.

[A] densely written, masterfully told tale.

A new, short, highly concentrated novel…meditating in brief paragraphs on the art and compromise with power over 50 years in the life of the composer Shostakovich.

A brilliant reflection of one man’s consciousness, amid the fear and terror of authoritarian rule. Completely gripping and informative and entertaining, it is a classic Barnes concoction.

Pulsing with riffs on love, music and honesty both personal and artistic, it depicts a man who knows he’s a coward, even if his scores are courageous… Barnes also captures the farcical side of life in Soviet Russia.

A tour de force by a master novelist at the top of his game.

Barnes’s prose is thoughtful and elegant.

Barnes pulls together all the strands of an artlessly diffuse and meticulously imagined portrait of life under tyranny.  It is masterfully done.

A distinctive and, as always with Barnes, highly readable marriage of suave execution and chilly, grown-up subject matter.

With its three-act structure, dramatic tension, lyrical passages and recurring motifs, the novel has an operatic quality.  Offering an intimate portrait of the artist and an overview of Russia’s troubled past, it’s a compelling read.

The Noise of Time is a brilliant impersonation, both as a novel and as a portrayal of the “real” historical Shostakovich.

A gripping story, a fascinating portrait of a period of history, and a brilliantly in-depth character study… Beautifully written… Philosophically and intellectually enriching.

A thoughtful, moving read about integrity, compromise and courage.

Barnes has some striking setpieces in this probing, intellectually robust novel.

The fear, danger and paranoia felt in those times rise memorably from the pages.

Barnes stands out, so vivid are his images and so poignant his insights. His works stand among the classics of the postmodern era, and for good reason.

A marvellous meditation on the Cold War era and particularly the battles of conscience that besiege a man living under tyranny.

The tone is intimate and aphoristic, the paragraphs succinct.

A fascinating account of the life of Dimitri Shostakovich… Perceptive, symbolic… The Noise of Time is an essential read, and not only for musicians.

This could well be his masterpiece… Beautifully written, it’s a sheer delight from start to finish.

A finely-tuned masterpiece... Barnes' prose is supreme.

An intimate portrait of a public intellectual living in a totalitarian atmosphere… Immersive… The Noise of Time presents a compelling story in engaging and original prose.

Kaleidoscopic portrait… Barnes deftly constructs a life history... A masterfully told story of survival. *****

Without a doubt, Barnes has succeeded the high expectations of the people who waited with bated breath for the release of The Noise of Time. In a work that feels both original and authentic, he encourages us to consider the importance of art, in whatever form, and the influence it can have on us all.

Barnes at his best...a poignant fictional recreation of the artistic agonies of the composer Shostakovich.

A very sensitive account of how art can be in conflict with naked political power.

Julian Barnes

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