The Man in the Red Coat

What a deliciously intelligent entertainment this is, couched in a prose of enviable suppleness… a master is at work here. – Rupert Christiansen * Daily Telegraph *One of his best books, very handsomely published too… [The Man in the Red Coat is] a bravura performance, highly entertaining. – David Sexton * Evening Standard, Book of the Week *Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way… punctuated by the sound of gunshot…[this is a] brilliant, defiantly unconventional book. – Adam Begley * Spectator *The Belle Époque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed with top fin-de-siècle tittle-tattle. – Robbie Millen and James Marriott * The Times The Best Books of 2019 *Julian Barnes’s wonderful The Man in the Red Coat surges round Belle Epoque Paris… a story full of digressions, white peacocks, missing limbs, amusing adverbs and fantastic clothes. An absolute tonic for grey winter days. – Claire Harman * Evening Standard Books of the Year *Fascinating history, biography and philosophy rolled into one. In The Man in the Red Coat, Barnes is the ideal guide to…a delightful amble through La Belle Epoque… a riveting dissection of an era. – Martin Chilton * Independent *This elegant, seductive history is a book best read in the spirit of its times. The Man In The Red Coat is less a lesson than a day-dream of France’s golden heyday. Wrap yourself in a Japanese tea gown, languish on a peacock-print sofa and abandon yourself to fin-de-siècle Paris and the ministrations of Doctor Love. – Laura Freeman * Mail on Sunday *As with his masterpiece, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), [Barnes’] new book [The Man in the Red Coat] seems different from anything ever written before. – John Carey * Sunday Times *This lavish study of society surgeon Samuel de Pozzi invites us into a world of artists, libertines and medical innovation… [it’s] enjoyably obsessive…biographical detective work. – Tim Adams * Observer, Book of the Week *Belle-Epoque Paris comes alive in this biography of a pioneering French doctor, Samuel Jean Pozzi… Barnes, the author of The Sense of an Ending, sketches his subject’s life in fascinating detail, including entanglements with Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt. – Joumana Khatib * New York Times *

Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize, 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 five works of non-fiction, including Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Legion d’honneur in 2017.

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