Julian Barnes Books in Order

Blending fiction and memoir, Departure follows Stephen and Jean, lovers reunited in later life, alongside an ageing writer confronting illness, memory lapses and lost friends. It is a reflective, often dryly funny meditation on love, leave takings and how stories end.

Adapted from a long essay, Changing My Mind sees Barnes examine how his views on politics, language, reading, memory and age have shifted over the decades. Short, conversational and self questioning, it doubles as an informal intellectual autobiography.

Neil, a drifting actor, enrolls in Elizabeth Finch's adult education class and becomes obsessed with his severe, enigmatic teacher. Years later, inheriting her notebooks, he pieces together her life and ideas, questioning memory, biography and what it means to admire someone.

This nonfiction portrait follows Samuel Jean de Pozzi, the charismatic surgeon in John Singer Sargent's red coated painting, through Belle Époque Paris. Barnes braids gossip, art, scandal and politics into a rich study of a brilliant, unsettled era.

At nineteen, Paul falls in love with Susan, a married woman almost thirty years older, at his suburban tennis club. Decades later he revisits their affair, asking what a first, all consuming love really costs over the course of a life.

Barnes imagines the inner life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich as he tries to survive Stalin and Khrushchev. Moving between a landing, a plane and a chauffeur driven car, the novel explores art under tyranny, compromise, cowardice and a stubborn instinct to endure.

This trio of linked pieces pays playful tribute to Hemingway's 'Homage to Switzerland'. In three snapshots of contemporary writers, Barnes anatomises ambition, loyalty to literary heroes and the hopeful belief that stories can still tell difficult truths.

Structured in three movements, Levels of Life links 19th century balloonists, an imagined love affair and Barnes's own grief for his wife Pat Kavanagh. It becomes a concentrated meditation on love, height and the plunge that follows an earthshaking loss.

Explaining the Explicit gathers Barnes and other writers reflecting on how to write about sex. Their candid, often funny essays weigh embarrassment, vocabulary and fashion, asking what explicit scenes can add to literature beyond simple shock or titillation.

Through the Window gathers seventeen essays and a short story in which Barnes writes about the novelists who formed him, from Flaubert and Ford Madox Ford to Penelope Fitzgerald and Updike, exploring translation, influence and how books travel between cultures.

In this brief, personal essay, Barnes looks back on childhood libraries, second hand bookshop trips and bouts of compulsive collecting. It is a warm defence of reading, printed books and the independent bookshops that helped shape his life.

Retired divorcee Tony Webster believes he understands his uneventful life until a mysterious bequest forces him back into the friendships and betrayals of his 1960s youth. As he revisits old letters, memory, guilt and narrative certainty quietly begin to unravel.

Pulse, Barnes's third story collection, moves between dinner parties, hospital rooms and European trips, tracing the rhythms that connect love affairs, family illnesses and everyday irritations. Quiet but emotionally sharp, the pieces watch how people respond to loss, attraction and time passing.

These essays on art trace a path from Romanticism to modern painting, focusing especially on French artists such as Géricault, Manet, Cézanne and Bonnard. Barnes blends close looking, biography and storytelling to show how pictures change once we really pay attention.

Part family memoir, part philosophical notebook, Nothing to be Frightened Of follows Barnes as he talks with his philosopher brother, remembers eccentric relatives and reads past writers, all in order to face his own fear of death and what might, or might not, follow.

Drawn from Nothing to be Frightened Of, this short book gathers Barnes's wry reflections on mortality, his parents' deaths, religious doubt and the consolations of art, turning fear of death into an unsentimental, oddly companionable conversation.

Based on a real Edwardian case, the novel twines the lives of George Edalji, a diligent solicitor wrongly convicted of animal mutilations, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who turns detective to clear his name. It becomes a searching story about justice and prejudice.

Stories in The Lemon Table circle around ageing and its discontents, from concertgoers and soldiers to lonely widows and stubborn gourmets. Barnes treats old age with dark humour and compassion, showing how desire, anger and curiosity persist even as bodies fail.

Drawn from his newspaper column, this slim book follows Barnes, an anxious home cook, as he wrestles with vague recipes, bossy chefs and dubious gadgets. Funny and precise, it is a comforting companion for anyone who has ever sworn at a cookbook.

A wide ranging collection of essays on France and French culture, from Flaubert and Simenon to nouvelle vague cinema and the Tour de France. Barnes writes as an affectionate, sharp eyed Francophile, curious about how one country appears from across the Channel.

Tycoon Sir Jack Pitman decides to rebuild the whole of England as a theme park on the Isle of Wight, complete with replica landmarks and hired heritage. Seen through Martha Cochrane's eyes, this satire probes memory, nationalism and manufactured nostalgia.

Evermore follows an Englishwoman who makes yearly pilgrimages to her brother's First World War grave in France. Her habitual journeys slowly reveal how ritual, landscape and chance encounters both preserve and erode the grief she has carried for decades.

These linked stories explore the long relationship between England and France, from 19th century railway builders to modern retirees in rural villages. Each tale catches small acts of misunderstanding, loyalty and betrayal that cross emotional as well as national borders.

Collecting his dispatches for an American magazine, Letters From London reports on British life between 1990 and 1995, from elections and royal scandals to football and the Channel Tunnel. Witty and skeptical, it turns recent politics into sharp, time capsule essays.

In a thinly disguised post communist state, former party leader Stoyo Petkanov is put on trial by a new government that tries to use his own laws against him. The courtroom battle becomes a tense argument about guilt, history and revenge.

Set a decade after Talking It Over, Love, Etc. revisits Stuart, Gillian and Oliver as they narrate their entangled lives once more. The old triangle has become a mix of compromises, resentments and uneasy loyalties, raising new questions about truth and forgiveness.

Three people tell the same story in turn: careful bank clerk Stuart, his charming but feckless friend Oliver and Gillian, the art restorer they both love. Their overlapping monologues chart how a marriage breaks and a love triangle dangerously reshapes their lives.

Neither straight history nor a conventional novel, this book offers ten and a half distinct tales, from woodworms on Noah's Ark to a hijacked cruise ship and a future heaven. Ships, survival and storytelling link the pieces in a playful, questioning collage.

Jean Serjeant seems an ordinary Englishwoman, yet her life stretches from the 1920s countryside to the year 2020. As she marries, travels and ages, she keeps interrogating received wisdom about God, truth and how to live in a changing world.

This playscript adapts Arthur & George for the stage, distilling the true life case of George Edalji and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into a courtroom drama. Scenes of investigation, prejudice and public uproar are reshaped for actors, audiences and live debate.

Retired doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite travels through Flaubert country, trying to identify which of two stuffed parrots once sat on the novelist's desk. His digressive search becomes a meditation on biography, obsession and the difficulty of ever pinning down another life.

After divorcing his bitter first wife, history lecturer Graham Hendrick marries Ann, an attractive former actress. Instead of enjoying his new happiness, he becomes consumed by fantasies about her previous lovers, letting jealousy twist his imagination and threaten everything he has.

Christopher Lloyd looks back on his youth in the London suburbs known as Metroland, his rebellious student year in Paris and his later settled life with a job, wife and child. The novel quietly weighs youthful ideals against adult contentment.