'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' Sunday Times Flaubert's Parrot is a massive lumber room of detail about the great man: in it we learn an enormous amount about his life, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But the voice that tells us all this is gradually revealed to be itself in the grip of an obsession. The voice is that of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor with a nagging need to rationalise his wife's suicide, and a more obscure compulsion to anatomise the processes of human identity.

Accolades

Winner of Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 1985.

Author Biography

Julian Barnes has published nine novels, Metroland, Before She Met Me , Flaubert's Parrot, Staring at the Sun, A History of the World in 10 Chapters, Talking It Over, The Porcupine, England, England and Love, etc; two books of short stories, Cross Channel and The Lemon Table; and also two collections of essays, Letters from London and Something to Declare. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Medicis (for Flaubert's Parrot ) and the Prix Femina (for Talking It Over). In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation of Hamburg. He lives in London.