Before She Met Me - (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes (Paperback)

About the Book

At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert's Parrot.

Book Synopsis

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers "a remarkably original and subtle book" (The New York Review of Books) about the nature of love and jealousy.

At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert's Parrot.

Review Quotes

"An intelligent and addictive entertainment." --The New York Times Book Review

"Excellent ... A remarkably original and subtle book." --The New York Review of Books

"Julian Barnes [is] one of today's most rewarding writers." --Chicago Tribune

"[Barnes] is not merely a dazzling entertainer ... he 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

"Funny, sad, faintly ominous...making jealousy tangible and dangerous." --Spectator

"Concise and witty about psychology, ideas and love, in all its many forms" --The Times

About the Author

Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.