Pulse
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3.8 • 27 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending examines longing and loss, friendship and love, the historical past and contemporary life—all with his trademark wit and sharply observant eye—in this extraordinary collection of short stories.
A newly divorced man invades his reticent girlfriend's privacy, only to discover that the information he finds reveals his own callously shallow curiosity. A couple comes together through an illicit cigarette and a song shared over the din of a Chinese restaurant. A widower revisiting the Scottish island he treasured with his wife learns how difficult it is to overcome grief. And scattered throughout, a group of friends gather regularly at dinner parties, perfecting the art of cerebral, sometimes bawdy banter. Each story in this masterful collection pulses with the resonance, spark, and poignant humor for which Barnes is justly heralded.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Companionship the search for, the basking in, and the loss of binds Barnes's first-rate collection of short stories, his first since 2004's The Lemon Table. In a lesser author's hands, a single story composed almost entirely of dialogue let alone four of them would collapse under the pressure of carrying off such a task and still moving along the narrative. But Barnes proves himself an erudite fly on the wall in his "At Phil and Joanna's" series, which involves the postdinner conversations of a group of London friends discussing everything from the 2008 election to marmalade, sex, and testicle operations and each character comes alive despite the slightest hints of description and exposition. Vernon in "East Wind," on the other hand, takes the notion of observing a step too far during an awkward courtship with a German waitress in a seaside town. Though their circumstances couldn't be more different, the characters in "Sleeping with John Updike," "Gardeners' World," and "Harmony" all find themselves at one time or another content in the knowledge of the space they share with a friend, spouse or healer, yet it is when this companionship is just out of reach, as in the dryly witty "Trespass," or snuffed out, as in the poignant title story, that Barnes shines brightest.
