Staring at the Sun

Staring at the Sun

Summary

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011

Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides.

Reviews

  • None of Mr Barnes's previous work... has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity of Staring at the Sun...it dazzles in depth
    Harpers & Queen

About the author

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 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 three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.
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