Cross Channel - (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes (Paperback)

About the Book

In his first collection of short stories, the author of "Flaubert's Parrot" and "Letters from London" spans three centuries and the vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension that separates England from France.

Book Synopsis

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, his first collection of short stories explores the vast divide between England and France. - "A witty, playful and ironic writer at the top of his form." --San Francisco Chronicle

In this collection, Barnes explores the narrow body of water containing the vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension which lies between England and France with acuity, humor, and compassion. For whether Barnes's English characters come to France as conquerors or hostages, laborers, athletes, or aesthetes, what they discover, alongside rich food and barbarous sexual and religious practices, is their own ineradicable Englishness. The ten stories that make up Cross Channel introduce us to a plethora of intriguing, original, and sometimes ill-fated characters.

Elegantly conceived and seductively written, Cross Channel is further evidence of Barnes's wizardry.

Review Quotes

"Barnes is a witty, playful and ironic writer at the top of his form ... Cross Channel is in the best sense an artful book." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Fluently written, finely observed ... delicately patterned." --The New York Times

About the Author

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and educated in London and Oxford. He worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, then as a journalist for the New Statesman, the Sunday Times and the Observer. He is the author of eight novels, a collection of essays, a book of short stories, and is the first Englishman to have won both the Prix Medicis and the Prix Femina. In 1988 he was made a Chevalier and in 1995 he became an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.