Departure(s)
The new book from the Booker Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 22 Jan 2026
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
Departure(s) is a work of fiction – but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
It is the story of a man called Stephen and a woman called Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. It is the story of an elderly Jack Russell called Jimmy, enviably oblivious to his own mortality.
It is also the story of how the body fails us, whether through age, illness, accident or intent. And it is the story of how experiences fade into anecdotes, and then into memory. Does it matter if what we remember really happened? Or does it just matter that it mattered enough to be remembered?
It begins at the end of life – but it doesn’t end there. Ultimately, it’s about the only things that ever really mattered: how we find happiness in this life, and when it is time to say goodbye.
'Metafictional, moving, unmistakably Barnes' OBSERVER
'There's no one quite like Julian Barnes' GUARDIAN
'Everything Julian Barnes writes changes everything' FRANCES WILSON, author of Electric Spark
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this revelatory meditation on love, death, and memory from Booker Prize winner Barnes (The Sense of an Ending), the narrator, a writer named Julian Barnes, claims this is his "last book." The novel is, in large part, concerned with how a writer treats people and the relationship between literature and life—Barnes reveals how he once manipulated a pair of college friends into rekindling their romance four decades later. When they announced their wedding, he was happy that his "investing" in them yielded a "satisfying conclusion to a story in a way that life rarely does." Elsewhere, the narrator touches on the indignities of chronic illness and aging and reflects on losing one's closest friends (Barnes writes with fondness of his late companions Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis). as In its closing pages, the slender and introspective novel explores the peculiar relationship between reader and writer: "Side by side, we look out at the many and varied expressions of life that pass in front of us." There's not much plot, but it's also not much missed—instead, Barnes dives headlong into the slippery nature of memory and what one forgets through time or necessity. It's an understated but graceful valediction by a writer whose work won't soon be forgotten.
