Staring at the Sun

'Teasing fullness, wit, incisiveness, gentleness and generosity' Times Literary SupplementWinner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides.

“None of Mr Barnes's previous work... has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity of Staring at the Sun ...it dazzles in depth”

None of Mr Barnes's previous work... has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity of Staring at the Sun...it dazzles in depth Harpers & Queen
Brilliant... Mr Barnes's work is at the forefront of a new internationalization of British fiction New York Times
A remarkable and risk-taking book, breezily philosophical and light-fingered, funny and also genuinely affecting in that it touches both the heart and the head Glasgow Herald

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Legion d'honneur.

A remarkable and risk-taking book, breezily philosophical and light-fingered, funny, and also genuinely affecting in that it touches both the heart and the head' Herald A fighter pilot, high above the English Channel in 1941, watches the sun rise; he descends 10,000 feet and then, to his amazement, finds the sun beginning to rise again. Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her questioning of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China; we learn othe questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides 'I am delighted to salute, from Mexico, the universal English voice of Julian Barnes, as he breaks barriers of conventional time and genre, creates characters from ideas and language, and stares not only at the sun but at the reader's intelligence' Carlos Fuentes, New York Times 'None of Mr Barnes's previous work...has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity of Staring at the Sun...it dazzles in depth' Harpers & Queen

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