Staring at the Sun

“Brilliant … a marvelous literary epiphany.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Barnes’s literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled.”—New Republic

“Julian Barnes is one of a handful of innovative English novelists who have succeeded in pulling the English novel out of the provincial rut in which it lay.” —Newsday

“Barnes’s books … celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions…. They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: esthetic bliss.” —Chicago Sun-Times 

“Julian Barnes [is] one of today’s most rewarding writers.” —Chicago Tribune

“Not merely a dazzling entertainer … [Barnes] 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

“One of England’s most interesting and provocative novelists … Barnes display[s] a remarkable versatility, a dashing wit, and a sense of irony that keeps his wonderfully idiosyncratic creations under tight control.” —New Republic

“[Barnes] demonstrates what a fabulous independent voice can accomplish when it keeps kicking away the crutches of contemporary fiction.” —Philadelphia Inquirer