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Departure
On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, one of our great novelists delivers a playful and profound work about memory, love and the writer's endgame.
Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the "There will be a story—or a story within the story—but not just yet.”
Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly a fictional story or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes's reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we're prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom. Julian played matchmaker to Stephen (tall, gangling, uncertain) and Jean (tart and attractive); as the third wheel, he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and forty years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals and disappointments of a different order.
Barnes uses both his novelistic memory and his (real?) personal diary entries to examine not just the quixotic relationship of Jean and Stephen but his writer's eye upon it, and how his efforts on their behalf add up in the end. Despite promising them he'd never write about them, he breaks that promise to fulfill another one, amply, to his readers, in this delightful and poignant novelist’s game that only Julian Barnes knows how to play.
Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the "There will be a story—or a story within the story—but not just yet.”
Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly a fictional story or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes's reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we're prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom. Julian played matchmaker to Stephen (tall, gangling, uncertain) and Jean (tart and attractive); as the third wheel, he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and forty years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals and disappointments of a different order.
Barnes uses both his novelistic memory and his (real?) personal diary entries to examine not just the quixotic relationship of Jean and Stephen but his writer's eye upon it, and how his efforts on their behalf add up in the end. Despite promising them he'd never write about them, he breaks that promise to fulfill another one, amply, to his readers, in this delightful and poignant novelist’s game that only Julian Barnes knows how to play.
157 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 20, 2026
244 people are currently reading
6237 people want to read
About the author
Julian Barnes
156 books6,827 followersJulian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (having married Pat Kavanagh). In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
In 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.
In 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
November 24, 2025
Julian Barnes mentions two things at the beginning of his latest book: there will be a story – or a story within a story – but not just yet; and this will be his last book.
As promised, there is indeed a story that might be fiction, or may be autobiographical, but most certainly is metafiction. There is a beginning to the story and an ending, but there is no middle. It is flawed story, fleshed out by three overlapping memories – the author’s (or the character named Julian Barnes who stands in for the author) and the man and woman whose relationship he narrates – two individuals he met at university in the 1960s. And in the middle, there is a black gaping hole where none of them had contact with the other two.
Although Julian Barnes had promised his friends – Jean and Steven – that he would never appropriate their story, he does. He waits until they die and assuages his conscience by doing so. But Departures isn’t about them – not really. Memories shift and deceive with time. It forces writers to reinvent and rework.
As he nears 80 years old, a loyal reader of his works can almost feel him questioning his legacy. A song from the Broadway play Hamilton popped into my mind: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” Barnes would no doubt answer, “Because I am.” He does not flinch in writing about his manageable but incurable blood cancer, his increasing frustration with age-related memory lapses. There are ghosts of his other extraordinary books: Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending revising his estimation of his place in the world; Levels of Life, a discourse on love and sorrow on the loss of his wife Pat Kavanaugh; or The Lemon Table and his mediations on growing old.
Now it’s real, and this may (or may not) be this great author’s endgame and his farewell. I will say this: for those of us who are more than casual readers of an author, an invisible bond begins to grow between us and them, even though we have never met them or spoken to them. We don’t know if this is truly Julian Barnes last book, but when he says, “I shall miss you,” it feels real. And corny though it sounds, I cried as if I had lost a friend. My thanks to Alfred A. Knopf for enabling me to be an early reader and reviewer of an all-time favorite author in exchange for an honest review.
As promised, there is indeed a story that might be fiction, or may be autobiographical, but most certainly is metafiction. There is a beginning to the story and an ending, but there is no middle. It is flawed story, fleshed out by three overlapping memories – the author’s (or the character named Julian Barnes who stands in for the author) and the man and woman whose relationship he narrates – two individuals he met at university in the 1960s. And in the middle, there is a black gaping hole where none of them had contact with the other two.
Although Julian Barnes had promised his friends – Jean and Steven – that he would never appropriate their story, he does. He waits until they die and assuages his conscience by doing so. But Departures isn’t about them – not really. Memories shift and deceive with time. It forces writers to reinvent and rework.
As he nears 80 years old, a loyal reader of his works can almost feel him questioning his legacy. A song from the Broadway play Hamilton popped into my mind: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” Barnes would no doubt answer, “Because I am.” He does not flinch in writing about his manageable but incurable blood cancer, his increasing frustration with age-related memory lapses. There are ghosts of his other extraordinary books: Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending revising his estimation of his place in the world; Levels of Life, a discourse on love and sorrow on the loss of his wife Pat Kavanaugh; or The Lemon Table and his mediations on growing old.
Now it’s real, and this may (or may not) be this great author’s endgame and his farewell. I will say this: for those of us who are more than casual readers of an author, an invisible bond begins to grow between us and them, even though we have never met them or spoken to them. We don’t know if this is truly Julian Barnes last book, but when he says, “I shall miss you,” it feels real. And corny though it sounds, I cried as if I had lost a friend. My thanks to Alfred A. Knopf for enabling me to be an early reader and reviewer of an all-time favorite author in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I was fully absorbed in, and entirely entertained by, Julian Barnes latest (and unfortunately last) novel. It is vintage Barnes, interested in memory and its unreliability, in stories and the gaps in them.
It struck me that he asks many of the same questions as Ian McEwan in his latest novel: what if we could know everything? What if we could remember everything? Wouldn't it be too much? Where McEwan looks at it from a technological perspective, Barnes takes a neurological view (and a literary view drawing as usual on a range of French authors). But both reach the same conclusion.
Departure(s) consists of five parts: a theoretical start about 'involuntary autobiographical memories (IAM)', then the highly entertaining story of two lovers who reunite after 40 years with Julian acting as a matchmaker, and finally a coda that manages to be both light and deeply emotional.
I also had an IAM while reading Departure(s), as I vividly remembered reading the Sense of an Ending on a long train journey in 2012 and rediscovering the pleasure of reading.
Goodreads tells me I've read 8 of his books since (Barnes says in the novel that he wrote 44 so there are enough left).
Although part of me doesn't exclude there may be another Barnes in the future - after all he is nothing if not unreliable (and this one felt particularly fresh and sharp), I am grateful for the fabulous reading experiences he's given me - surprising, elegant, playful, precise and smart.
It struck me that he asks many of the same questions as Ian McEwan in his latest novel: what if we could know everything? What if we could remember everything? Wouldn't it be too much? Where McEwan looks at it from a technological perspective, Barnes takes a neurological view (and a literary view drawing as usual on a range of French authors). But both reach the same conclusion.
Departure(s) consists of five parts: a theoretical start about 'involuntary autobiographical memories (IAM)', then the highly entertaining story of two lovers who reunite after 40 years with Julian acting as a matchmaker, and finally a coda that manages to be both light and deeply emotional.
I also had an IAM while reading Departure(s), as I vividly remembered reading the Sense of an Ending on a long train journey in 2012 and rediscovering the pleasure of reading.
Goodreads tells me I've read 8 of his books since (Barnes says in the novel that he wrote 44 so there are enough left).
Although part of me doesn't exclude there may be another Barnes in the future - after all he is nothing if not unreliable (and this one felt particularly fresh and sharp), I am grateful for the fabulous reading experiences he's given me - surprising, elegant, playful, precise and smart.
January 20, 2026
I hadn’t realized until I finished that I’d been reading this supposed final book by Julian Barnes on his 80th birthday. I found that out when I checked Wikipedia to see if he was still alive. I think “Jules” would find that funny as he spends a good few paragraphs talking about how we begin to loose track of who is still alive as we get older.
Much of this book is about memory, aging, and whether or not one is or ought to be raging against that final departure which is inevitable for all of us.
I think the first section on memory and Proust’s madeleine was a bit tedious for me but I’m glad I continued on as I found his discussion of his cancer diagnosis quite interesting (I’m a former oncology nurse) and certainly his “re-kindler” friends and their failure was very cleverly observed.
The end returns again to memory but it’s also a farewell and I appreciated his “departing” words and that writing too.
Happy 80th Birthday Jules!
(Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.)
Much of this book is about memory, aging, and whether or not one is or ought to be raging against that final departure which is inevitable for all of us.
I think the first section on memory and Proust’s madeleine was a bit tedious for me but I’m glad I continued on as I found his discussion of his cancer diagnosis quite interesting (I’m a former oncology nurse) and certainly his “re-kindler” friends and their failure was very cleverly observed.
The end returns again to memory but it’s also a farewell and I appreciated his “departing” words and that writing too.
Happy 80th Birthday Jules!
(Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.)
November 19, 2025
I need people to read this; I am SOBBING and need to know if that is normal.
January 21, 2026
Is it fiction or is it non-? With an author as sly as Barnes, hard to tell. Nonetheless, with its Proustian references and trips to the past with characters (or is it him?) from his Uni days, does it really matter? I listened to the entire work in one sitting as he narrated it himself. And the ending made me cry.
January 24, 2026
És estar en les millors mans.
Read
January 10, 2026A beautiful final farewell from Barnes. He is saying goodbye to storytelling, reading, remembering and living here. I wept at the end of this book. Barnes’s work has meant a lot to me over the years and as much as I wish this wasn’t goodbye, it’s a perfect departure.
December 20, 2025
4.5
This is a novel. Or: it’s literary nonfiction. On the spectrum from fiction to nonfiction, it definitely leans toward literary nonfiction—for me. But I still view it as a novel. Do you feel me?
The narrator is Barnes himself, reflecting on his cancer diagnosis, death, coming to the end of life, and memory. He also meditates on the relationship between two of his friends, who first meet as students at Oxford and reconnect decades later, exploring their complicated love story and conflicting personalities in both eras of their lives.
The book is also deeply metafictional—or is it, if it’s basically nonfiction despite being christened as fiction?—and Barnes examines fiction’s strengths and limitations, simultaneously admiring great works that came before, while gently picking certain ideas apart and highlighting their fallacies.
I loved it. What a beautiful book, both funny and sad. It will be Barnes’s last—and it has the depth and pathos you’d hope for in the final novel of someone who has been writing for over forty years.
•
(Longer review coming, but it won’t appear here.)
This is a novel. Or: it’s literary nonfiction. On the spectrum from fiction to nonfiction, it definitely leans toward literary nonfiction—for me. But I still view it as a novel. Do you feel me?
The narrator is Barnes himself, reflecting on his cancer diagnosis, death, coming to the end of life, and memory. He also meditates on the relationship between two of his friends, who first meet as students at Oxford and reconnect decades later, exploring their complicated love story and conflicting personalities in both eras of their lives.
The book is also deeply metafictional—or is it, if it’s basically nonfiction despite being christened as fiction?—and Barnes examines fiction’s strengths and limitations, simultaneously admiring great works that came before, while gently picking certain ideas apart and highlighting their fallacies.
I loved it. What a beautiful book, both funny and sad. It will be Barnes’s last—and it has the depth and pathos you’d hope for in the final novel of someone who has been writing for over forty years.
•
(Longer review coming, but it won’t appear here.)
January 17, 2026
Julian Barnes shares his final novel with us as he wraps his illustrious writing career. More auto/non fiction than novel, it’s a somber treat to read his reflections on death, aging and “here we go again”-ism. I’m a sucker for reflective musings on aging and death. So this slim volume lands smack dab in the center of my wheelhouse. The story within a story just adds to the rumination as we get to follow along as two of his university friends romantically reconnect 40 years later. I think this interlude works well with the subject matter. As we age, aren’t we constantly thinking about the one who got away? Imagining the life we’d have lived had we made different decisions. What if we could spin the block again a lifetime later?
How terrifying, how thrilling, how lucky to grapple with your inevitable, impending departure with stunning wit, unexpected humor and a sobering clarity.
Thanks for one last gift, Mr. Barnes.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for the advance reading copy in exchange for my honest review.
How terrifying, how thrilling, how lucky to grapple with your inevitable, impending departure with stunning wit, unexpected humor and a sobering clarity.
Thanks for one last gift, Mr. Barnes.
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for the advance reading copy in exchange for my honest review.
January 21, 2026
4.5 stars
Review to follow.
Review to follow.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for providing me with an eARC.
This was a very interesting book. It's mostly in a stream of consciousness/rambling thoughts format but in this case I think it worked well, given the author's situation. The title worked out quite well too -- to me it signified the departures in memory the author was trying to come to terms with given his impending departure from the world. It was sad and thoughtful all at once. This was a well written book and toed the line between fiction and non fiction. There were too many tangents for me to comfortably absorb the entire book but whatever I did, I enjoyed. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a book about last thoughts and coming to terms with one's life towards the end.
This was a very interesting book. It's mostly in a stream of consciousness/rambling thoughts format but in this case I think it worked well, given the author's situation. The title worked out quite well too -- to me it signified the departures in memory the author was trying to come to terms with given his impending departure from the world. It was sad and thoughtful all at once. This was a well written book and toed the line between fiction and non fiction. There were too many tangents for me to comfortably absorb the entire book but whatever I did, I enjoyed. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a book about last thoughts and coming to terms with one's life towards the end.
October 17, 2025
Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for the ARC of Departure(s).
After about 10 pages of reading this book, I had to quickly look back at the title page to assure myself that I was reading a novel. I even went online and looked up the title just to make sure. “Departure(s): A Novel” the browser said in bold text. I did so because the book was reading surprisingly like a memoir, which I didn’t mind at all. I had enjoyed Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of very much when I read it years ago, and Departure(s) was starting to feel like a companion book to NTBFO, a continuation or update of that memoir. But the book in hand clearly stated itself as a novel, so as a novel I read it.
Departure(s) is an enjoyable, marvelous reading experience. The novel is narrated by Julian, a near octogenarian who resembles the novelist Julian Barnes a great deal. Julian is also a novelist suffering from many ailments, conditions, and disease who relates the story of how he came to be the person who brought together (to life?) two people into a relationship not once but twice. In relating their story, Julian examines love and its meaning, its power to bring people together, and its pain when it fails. This is where Departure(s) reads like a novel. There is dialogue and exposition, scenes in different locations. But always with Julian’s insight to help us along. It is a melancholy rumination on what love is, on the individual and personal definition of love and how two people can say they love one another and mean two completely different things.
The story of this couple is told in between sections of Julian writing about memory and identity, his illness, his preoccupation with death, aging, writing, death, friendship, love, Jimmy the dog, death, legacy, and goodbyes. Some dark stuff. But since this is Julian Barnes writing about these subjects, I was nodding my head and laughing most of the time. There is no doubt that people of a certain age (ahem) will find the preoccupation with aging and death more relevant(?) or poignant, but Barnes’s wit and insight will definitely enlighten and lighten the existential load. It’s not an easy subject to read about, but Barnes’s conversational tone keeps the reader engaged intellectually and emotionally. It’s like having a good friend sitting at a table just riffing on life, sharing experience and insight. You might not agree with everything he says, but it’s a wonderful way to spend an evening.
We’re not supposed to quote from ARCs because the text might change before publication, and that is a shame because there are many lines in Departure(s) that I highlighted for their insight or humor, usually both. There are memorable lines one can almost use as mantras when a bit of the existential darkness blackens the day. There is no surrender to the inevitable, just a clear-eyed, grudging acceptance of it. And if this is Barnes’s farewell to his readers, it is a marvelous way to bid adieu. Thank you, Julian.
After about 10 pages of reading this book, I had to quickly look back at the title page to assure myself that I was reading a novel. I even went online and looked up the title just to make sure. “Departure(s): A Novel” the browser said in bold text. I did so because the book was reading surprisingly like a memoir, which I didn’t mind at all. I had enjoyed Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened Of very much when I read it years ago, and Departure(s) was starting to feel like a companion book to NTBFO, a continuation or update of that memoir. But the book in hand clearly stated itself as a novel, so as a novel I read it.
Departure(s) is an enjoyable, marvelous reading experience. The novel is narrated by Julian, a near octogenarian who resembles the novelist Julian Barnes a great deal. Julian is also a novelist suffering from many ailments, conditions, and disease who relates the story of how he came to be the person who brought together (to life?) two people into a relationship not once but twice. In relating their story, Julian examines love and its meaning, its power to bring people together, and its pain when it fails. This is where Departure(s) reads like a novel. There is dialogue and exposition, scenes in different locations. But always with Julian’s insight to help us along. It is a melancholy rumination on what love is, on the individual and personal definition of love and how two people can say they love one another and mean two completely different things.
The story of this couple is told in between sections of Julian writing about memory and identity, his illness, his preoccupation with death, aging, writing, death, friendship, love, Jimmy the dog, death, legacy, and goodbyes. Some dark stuff. But since this is Julian Barnes writing about these subjects, I was nodding my head and laughing most of the time. There is no doubt that people of a certain age (ahem) will find the preoccupation with aging and death more relevant(?) or poignant, but Barnes’s wit and insight will definitely enlighten and lighten the existential load. It’s not an easy subject to read about, but Barnes’s conversational tone keeps the reader engaged intellectually and emotionally. It’s like having a good friend sitting at a table just riffing on life, sharing experience and insight. You might not agree with everything he says, but it’s a wonderful way to spend an evening.
We’re not supposed to quote from ARCs because the text might change before publication, and that is a shame because there are many lines in Departure(s) that I highlighted for their insight or humor, usually both. There are memorable lines one can almost use as mantras when a bit of the existential darkness blackens the day. There is no surrender to the inevitable, just a clear-eyed, grudging acceptance of it. And if this is Barnes’s farewell to his readers, it is a marvelous way to bid adieu. Thank you, Julian.
September 19, 2025
Departure(s) begins by delving into the many theorists behind IAM’s and HSAM - both of these things being conditions believed to provide people with the ability to recall things beyond ‘normal’ ability. Julian Barnes questions, would you if you had the choice want to know absolutely everything about yourself?
As the next couple of chapters begin, we are introduced to Stephen and Jean - although their names may be fictional, their story is anything but. Stephen and Jean were in a relationship in their younger days but split up only to years later ‘coincidentally’ bump into eachother again. It is that of three perspectives - Stephen, Jean and Julian himself. This is where memory becomes a crucial factor, Julian did not see Stephen nor Jean for 40 years, so can only rely on their recollection to fill in any blanks and as he says himself, with an ageing mind, what he recalls now could potentially be how he chooses to remember it but not actually what happened.
Following on from this, we see Julian receive his blood cancer diagnosis during COVID lockdown in 2020 and he goes into detail of his opinions on death and how you become familiar with it as you grow older. He covers reuniting with Stephen and Jean and shows many things from all three perspectives.
There’s so much more that occurs within this book but I’ll refrain from saying much more so that you can read it for yourselves and love the novel as much as I do! It’s a book that you truly need to experience for yourself to feel the full effect of it.
This story, although it is short, really and truly tells a compelling story and I’m so glad I’ve read it.
Thank you Vintage Books for very kindly gifting this to me!
5⭐️
As the next couple of chapters begin, we are introduced to Stephen and Jean - although their names may be fictional, their story is anything but. Stephen and Jean were in a relationship in their younger days but split up only to years later ‘coincidentally’ bump into eachother again. It is that of three perspectives - Stephen, Jean and Julian himself. This is where memory becomes a crucial factor, Julian did not see Stephen nor Jean for 40 years, so can only rely on their recollection to fill in any blanks and as he says himself, with an ageing mind, what he recalls now could potentially be how he chooses to remember it but not actually what happened.
Following on from this, we see Julian receive his blood cancer diagnosis during COVID lockdown in 2020 and he goes into detail of his opinions on death and how you become familiar with it as you grow older. He covers reuniting with Stephen and Jean and shows many things from all three perspectives.
There’s so much more that occurs within this book but I’ll refrain from saying much more so that you can read it for yourselves and love the novel as much as I do! It’s a book that you truly need to experience for yourself to feel the full effect of it.
This story, although it is short, really and truly tells a compelling story and I’m so glad I’ve read it.
Thank you Vintage Books for very kindly gifting this to me!
5⭐️
January 21, 2026
This truly felt like a goodbye, or should I say a departure, from Barnes. I resonate so deeply with his fears of death, that this was actually quite an existential read in some ways. But, as Barnes shows in this fictional (?!)—let’s at least go with incredibly meta, he seems to come to terms with the prospect of non-existence. I hope I will, too.
I began this novel, ironically, on a train back from Oxford, after eating sandwich’s in The Covered Market. I was then a bit, something —I’m not even sure how to describe the feeling—, when I started reading, and couldn’t really put it down. It was finished in two sittings. I do see myself in all three characters: Stephen, Jean, and Jules, for reasons that should only be witnessed by the pages of my diary, let alone a public goodreads post. I think I find such comfort in finding myself between lines—there’s a notion of ‘oh, this person notices this, feels this, does this, observes this, too.’
Barnes, without any doubt, and with such wit too, has succeeded in perfectly articulating the human condition. He proves that a truly great novelist, is not a job or career, but a way of being.
I began this novel, ironically, on a train back from Oxford, after eating sandwich’s in The Covered Market. I was then a bit, something —I’m not even sure how to describe the feeling—, when I started reading, and couldn’t really put it down. It was finished in two sittings. I do see myself in all three characters: Stephen, Jean, and Jules, for reasons that should only be witnessed by the pages of my diary, let alone a public goodreads post. I think I find such comfort in finding myself between lines—there’s a notion of ‘oh, this person notices this, feels this, does this, observes this, too.’
Barnes, without any doubt, and with such wit too, has succeeded in perfectly articulating the human condition. He proves that a truly great novelist, is not a job or career, but a way of being.
January 24, 2026
Reading Julian Barnes is always a delight! It is a monologue by the author, on his stage, and we are invited to listen, feel, think, and debate with him.
This one, as by its title, is about the many departures we choose or are forced to make throughout life. But, Barnes is not interested in the journey this time, he wants to talk about beginnings and ends. And while doing that, he offers us a real journey! Many arrivals and departures into poetry, literature, love, brexit, covid, cancer, friendships, and writing.
It is sad to say goodbye to this book and to Barnes, who mentions that this will be his last book. But hey, he left us so many rereadables, so maybe we can let him go and reread his big favorites for one last time.
This one, as by its title, is about the many departures we choose or are forced to make throughout life. But, Barnes is not interested in the journey this time, he wants to talk about beginnings and ends. And while doing that, he offers us a real journey! Many arrivals and departures into poetry, literature, love, brexit, covid, cancer, friendships, and writing.
It is sad to say goodbye to this book and to Barnes, who mentions that this will be his last book. But hey, he left us so many rereadables, so maybe we can let him go and reread his big favorites for one last time.
January 22, 2026
I’d forgotten what an astonishingly good host Barnes is; a confident, witty, wise, charming, self-effacing presence to the last. If this book is thin on ‘plot’, and equally heavy on digression, that doesn’t make it a light book; it’s being his last, he fits an awful lot in to a very few pages, but- to return to my initial statement- gee whiz he makes it fun. Sad, sure. Slightly annoyingly aside-laden, yes, but so funny. His prose is perfect; the best words for the best sentences, and although not plot-driven (a man is ill, man is Julian Barnes, Julian Barnes brought a couple together twice, forty years apart) what little there is instigates page upon page of magnificent rumination on memory, death, dogs, Proust, travel, and life in all its multitudes, all stitched together beautifully. A delight.
January 20, 2026
Julian Barnes, “Departure(s),” and the Art of a Quiet Goodbye
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Julian Barnes has always written as if prose were a form of calibrated thought: the sentence as a tuning fork, struck and listened to for its aftertone of irony, doubt, and (just beneath the polish) feeling. “Departure(s)” extends that lifelong method into a late style that is both sharper and more porous, as though the author’s customary skepticism has been placed in direct contact with the body’s new, unignorable facts. It is a book about memory – how it arrives, how it lies, how it consoles, how it convicts – and also about the ethics of turning other people’s lives into narrative, especially when the writer hints, early and plainly, that he is nearing the end of his own.
Barnes begins, characteristically, not with plot but with an apparently adjacent curiosity: the Proustian madeleine and the modern neurological term for its effect, “involuntary autobiographical memory.” From there he moves, with the sly authority of the essayist who knows how to make a footnote feel like a confession, into an unsettling possibility: what if memory stopped being a selective, moth-eaten cabinet and became a high-speed, comprehensive archive? Not just of first kisses and exam failures, but of the ledger items we prefer to misfile: the moment you enjoyed someone’s humiliation, the moment you withheld a kindness to preserve your pride, the moment you said “I love you” because you wanted the sentence to be true. Barnes’s gift has always been to make such moral questions feel less like courtroom drama than like intimate housekeeping, and he does it here with a familiar combination of erudition and mischief. He knows that intellectual life can be a way of avoiding feeling. He also knows it can be a way of approaching feeling without collapsing into sentiment.
Two bulletins arrive early, and they function like stage directions delivered from the wings. There will be a story, but not yet. This will be the last book. The second statement does not read as a publicity flourish. It reads as a constraint Barnes imposes on himself – a refusal of the usual career-capping gestures: the late-life manifesto, the grand summary, the authorial coronation. He has always been suspicious of the public’s hunger for “the definitive take,” and in “Departure(s)” that suspicion hardens into a kind of ethics. The book’s subject is departure, but its deeper subject is proportion: how to write about what matters without inflating it into a performance of importance.
The opening chapter, “The Great I AM,” is an intellectual overture that refuses to behave like a showpiece. Barnes tours neurological case studies and the literature of memory the way he has always toured art history or French letters: with elegance, with a mild appetite for the absurd, and with the suspicion that reverence is simply another style of self-deception. He is very funny about the body and very serious about the mind, then flips the two in the next paragraph, as if to insist that neither can be trusted to stay in its assigned category. A person with near-perfect recall becomes, in Barnes’s hands, less a marvel than a warning: the inability to forget as a kind of tyranny, the past not as treasure but as trap. Forgetting, he suggests, is not merely a flaw in the system. It is part of the system’s mercy.
It is hard not to read these pages as quietly contemporary. We live in an age that has turned remembrance into infrastructure. Phones keep our photographs, platforms keep our correspondence, calendars keep our obligations, and algorithms keep resurfacing old selves with chirpy insistence. The old fear was forgetting. The newer fear is being unable to forget – or being unable to stop the world from remembering on your behalf. Barnes’s imagined future of “tapping” the past does not feel like science fiction so much as a moral exaggeration of daily life: a world in which the record exists in too many places, a world in which the self is increasingly treated as a set of retrievable files. The more we outsource memory, the more we discover that memory was never merely storage. It was interpretation, selection, erasure. It was, in its imperfect way, a form of sanity.
Then the body enters, and the book’s argument changes temperature. In 2020, Barnes’s narrator receives a diagnosis of a blood cancer described to him with the blunt, almost absurdly English reassurance that it is “manageable.” The word becomes a philosophical irritant, worrying at the book’s edges. “Manageable” is meant to soothe, yet it contains its own dread: not curable, not vanishing, simply incorporated. The illness will not provide a climax. It will persist, altering the texture of time and attention. Barnes is very good on medicine’s peculiar mixture of precision and vagueness, its reliance on probabilities that can feel like prophecy when your body is the sample size. He is also very good at refusing the contemporary script of illness as moral theater. There is no inspirational arc here, no tidy narrative of bravery, no convenient character development earned through suffering. Barnes’s stance is closer to Susan Sontag’s suspicion of metaphor: illness does not ennoble; it simply happens. What changes is not the meaning of life, but the scheduling of it.
Lockdown arrives, and with it the era’s chorus: the newly sanctified doorstoppers people vow to read (“Ulysses,” “War and Peace,” “Middlemarch”), the home-viewing projects, the sense that time has become both surplus and starvation. Barnes, never one to miss the comedy of taste, chooses a marathon immersion in Ingmar Bergman, noting – with a dry grin you can almost hear – that he has been accused of morbidity, as if Bergman were not also, in his way, a humorist. The pandemic context is not used for topical resonance, and that restraint is part of the book’s intelligence. Barnes does not want the easy authority of being “of the moment.” Yet “Departure(s)” is haunted by the moment anyway, because the moment is haunted by what the book is about: the collapse of certainty, the ordinary surveillance of health, the thinness of the social world when it is stripped of routine, the way the body’s risks become public mathematics.
Only then does the promised story begin – and Barnes makes that story itself a demonstration of his opening claims. In the mid-1960s, at Oxford, he meets two people, Stephen and Jean. He knows them separately, then introduces them, and watches them fall into love. The early pages of this section contain Barnes’s characteristic braid of tones: affectionate self-mockery, sociological observation, and the faint sting of belated embarrassment. Oxford, he jokes, should perhaps be banned as a setting, as though the institution’s literary overexposure were itself a moral failure. Beneath the joke is a more interesting discomfort: the recognition that youth often happens inside a kind of bubble, and that the bubble does not prevent pain, it merely makes pain feel like a scandal.
Stephen and Jean are drawn with careful economy. Stephen appears tall, awkward, earnest, a young man already practicing adulthood’s habits of order. Jean is restless, socially alive, impatient with stasis. Barnes positions his younger self between them as intermediary and witness, observer and inadvertent participant – the person who will later tell the tale and therefore alter it. Their romance contains a familiar human trap: the false binary. Marry or split. There is, they insist, nothing in between – a youthful absolutism that already sounds like adulthood’s compromises in disguise. Barnes’s treatment of their relationship is tender but unsparing. He is not a romantic in the usual sense. He believes in love, but he does not believe love cancels the rest of the human inventory: vanity, fear, boredom, pride, the craving to be chosen without having to change.
Here “Departure(s)” makes one of its bracing moves. It treats friendship as a site of jealousy and possession, not only romance. Barnes is candid about the ego’s imperialism in intimacy: our tendency to treat other people’s lives as supporting architecture for our own. He brings Stephen and Jean together and, without quite admitting it, invests in their relationship as a kind of proof that life can be made coherent. When it breaks, the narrator’s pain is not only grief for them. It is the shock of discovering how much he had wanted their love to certify his own sense of order. In a culture that has become fluent in romantic grievance and newly celebratory about friendship, Barnes reminds us that friendship has its own betrayals, its own hidden contracts, its own way of making us feel abandoned without providing a socially acceptable language for the wound.
The title’s parenthetical plural matters. This is not a single departure, clean and cinematic. It is a series of exits, some chosen, some imposed, some unnoticed until years later. Stephen and Jean depart from each other. They depart from the narrator. The narrator departs from his younger self, that earlier version of him who could not name his emotional investments. And hovering over all of it is the largest departure, the one the book approaches without theatricality: the departure from the illusion that a life’s central story can be told cleanly, or that any ending will arrive with a satisfying sense of completion.
Decades later Barnes reintroduces Stephen and Jean in a rekindling episode that feels less like fate than like the stubborn persistence of unfinished emotional business. The story arrives in two halves separated by forty years; the method arrives in two textures as well. The later half is supported by notebooks and diaries written close to events, and Barnes is suspicious of these too. Documentation, he suggests, is not truth; it is triage. Notes record what the writer decided was worth saving and what he guessed might be useful later. The diary is not a transcript; it is an early draft. In that sense, the book quietly undermines one of the modern era’s most comforting fantasies: that we can outsmart the unreliability of memory by collecting more evidence. Evidence, Barnes implies, is simply another form of selection, and selection is where the self reveals its bias.
Barnes complicates his position further by acknowledging an ethical snag: he once promised he would never write about these people. He changes names and tells us, plainly, that he is breaking his promise in order to tell the story. In another writer’s hands this might feel like a manufactured frisson, a wink toward transgression. Here it reads as moral accounting. Barnes is less interested in absolution than in accuracy about the nature of his offense. In an era when confession is often treated as cleansing – speak it, post it, move on – Barnes treats confession as complication. The telling does not purify the teller. It only clarifies what the teller is willing to do for the sake of a narrative.
What, then, does “Departure(s)” believe about literature’s powers? Barnes has always lived on the narrow ridge between romantic faith in art and fashionable cynicism about it. He does not endorse the beautiful lie that literature redeems suffering, but he also refuses the easy pose that nothing matters beyond diversion. His humor is real, sometimes wickedly funny, but it is never a dodge. Barnes laughs the way some people pray – an acknowledgement of limits, an antidote to the self’s grandiosity. If “Illness as Metaphor” resisted the symbolic inflation of sickness, and “Being Mortal” offered a humane argument for better endings, Barnes offers something at once narrower and more elusive: a demonstration of how a mind tries to remain honest when it can no longer pretend it has time to lie.
For readers who know Barnes’s earlier work, “Departure(s)” feels like late-career distillation. It echoes the griefwise lucidity of “Levels of Life,” the moral pressure of “The Sense of an Ending,” and the earlier conversation with death in “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” but it is quieter than all three, more interested in relinquishing authority than in winning arguments. It also shares a lineage with late-style books that practice restraint as courage: Didion’s “Blue Nights” in its watchful austerity, Thomas Bernhard’s “Old Masters” in its insistence that brilliance can coexist with abrasion, Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet” in its devotion to interior weather. Barnes is less feverish than any of these writers and less theatrical than his own reputation might suggest. His primary drama is the mind’s refusal to grant itself a simple story.
The contemporary relevance of “Departure(s)” is not topical reference but structural sympathy with the present moment. We live amid chronic conditions – medical, civic, informational – described as manageable rather than solvable. We inhabit archives we did not build and cannot fully control. We are asked to manufacture meaning out of too much data and too little certainty. Barnes declines to manufacture. He insists on the difference between remembering and understanding, and he suggests that our appetite for meaning can become its own form of cruelty: a demand that grief justify itself, that illness become instructive, that love leave behind a clean moral. This is, in a subtle way, an anti-algorithmic book. It does not optimize. It does not persuade with slogans. It sits with ambiguity as though ambiguity were not a failure of thought but the honest condition of it.
There are, inevitably, moments when Barnes’s control risks dulling the messier pulse of feeling. Some readers may wish he would relinquish the intellectual grip and let the story of Stephen and Jean spill beyond its conceptual frame. But that wish may misunderstand Barnes’s temperament. His intimacy has always arrived through analysis. The restraint is the emotion, shaped. If the book sometimes holds the reader at arm’s length, it does so in the name of an ethic that feels increasingly rare: the refusal to manipulate. Barnes does not ask the reader to be moved on schedule. He does not trade in easy catharsis. He offers companionship without insisting on reciprocity, which can feel, at first, like coolness. Over time it begins to feel like respect.
The final coda functions less as an epilogue than as a quiet handshake. Barnes imagines writer and reader sitting together, side by side, not as teacher and pupil but as companions of attention. It is a modest image, almost stubbornly modest, and that stubbornness feels like the book’s last argument. Literature, in this view, is not a ladder out of the human condition. It is a bench in it. A place to sit for a while, to look clearly, and then to stand and leave without pretending the leaving is unique.
My rating for “Departure(s)” is 88 out of 100: not because it is flawless, but because it is rare – a late work that does not coast on reputation, that still argues with itself, that risks awkward honesty, and that still believes style is a form of moral attention. Barnes has always understood that how we tell a story is part of what the story means. Here, he turns that understanding on the hardest material of all: the record inside the skull, the record inside the blood, and the fragile human wish to make a coherent sentence before the lights go out.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Julian Barnes has always written as if prose were a form of calibrated thought: the sentence as a tuning fork, struck and listened to for its aftertone of irony, doubt, and (just beneath the polish) feeling. “Departure(s)” extends that lifelong method into a late style that is both sharper and more porous, as though the author’s customary skepticism has been placed in direct contact with the body’s new, unignorable facts. It is a book about memory – how it arrives, how it lies, how it consoles, how it convicts – and also about the ethics of turning other people’s lives into narrative, especially when the writer hints, early and plainly, that he is nearing the end of his own.
Barnes begins, characteristically, not with plot but with an apparently adjacent curiosity: the Proustian madeleine and the modern neurological term for its effect, “involuntary autobiographical memory.” From there he moves, with the sly authority of the essayist who knows how to make a footnote feel like a confession, into an unsettling possibility: what if memory stopped being a selective, moth-eaten cabinet and became a high-speed, comprehensive archive? Not just of first kisses and exam failures, but of the ledger items we prefer to misfile: the moment you enjoyed someone’s humiliation, the moment you withheld a kindness to preserve your pride, the moment you said “I love you” because you wanted the sentence to be true. Barnes’s gift has always been to make such moral questions feel less like courtroom drama than like intimate housekeeping, and he does it here with a familiar combination of erudition and mischief. He knows that intellectual life can be a way of avoiding feeling. He also knows it can be a way of approaching feeling without collapsing into sentiment.
Two bulletins arrive early, and they function like stage directions delivered from the wings. There will be a story, but not yet. This will be the last book. The second statement does not read as a publicity flourish. It reads as a constraint Barnes imposes on himself – a refusal of the usual career-capping gestures: the late-life manifesto, the grand summary, the authorial coronation. He has always been suspicious of the public’s hunger for “the definitive take,” and in “Departure(s)” that suspicion hardens into a kind of ethics. The book’s subject is departure, but its deeper subject is proportion: how to write about what matters without inflating it into a performance of importance.
The opening chapter, “The Great I AM,” is an intellectual overture that refuses to behave like a showpiece. Barnes tours neurological case studies and the literature of memory the way he has always toured art history or French letters: with elegance, with a mild appetite for the absurd, and with the suspicion that reverence is simply another style of self-deception. He is very funny about the body and very serious about the mind, then flips the two in the next paragraph, as if to insist that neither can be trusted to stay in its assigned category. A person with near-perfect recall becomes, in Barnes’s hands, less a marvel than a warning: the inability to forget as a kind of tyranny, the past not as treasure but as trap. Forgetting, he suggests, is not merely a flaw in the system. It is part of the system’s mercy.
It is hard not to read these pages as quietly contemporary. We live in an age that has turned remembrance into infrastructure. Phones keep our photographs, platforms keep our correspondence, calendars keep our obligations, and algorithms keep resurfacing old selves with chirpy insistence. The old fear was forgetting. The newer fear is being unable to forget – or being unable to stop the world from remembering on your behalf. Barnes’s imagined future of “tapping” the past does not feel like science fiction so much as a moral exaggeration of daily life: a world in which the record exists in too many places, a world in which the self is increasingly treated as a set of retrievable files. The more we outsource memory, the more we discover that memory was never merely storage. It was interpretation, selection, erasure. It was, in its imperfect way, a form of sanity.
Then the body enters, and the book’s argument changes temperature. In 2020, Barnes’s narrator receives a diagnosis of a blood cancer described to him with the blunt, almost absurdly English reassurance that it is “manageable.” The word becomes a philosophical irritant, worrying at the book’s edges. “Manageable” is meant to soothe, yet it contains its own dread: not curable, not vanishing, simply incorporated. The illness will not provide a climax. It will persist, altering the texture of time and attention. Barnes is very good on medicine’s peculiar mixture of precision and vagueness, its reliance on probabilities that can feel like prophecy when your body is the sample size. He is also very good at refusing the contemporary script of illness as moral theater. There is no inspirational arc here, no tidy narrative of bravery, no convenient character development earned through suffering. Barnes’s stance is closer to Susan Sontag’s suspicion of metaphor: illness does not ennoble; it simply happens. What changes is not the meaning of life, but the scheduling of it.
Lockdown arrives, and with it the era’s chorus: the newly sanctified doorstoppers people vow to read (“Ulysses,” “War and Peace,” “Middlemarch”), the home-viewing projects, the sense that time has become both surplus and starvation. Barnes, never one to miss the comedy of taste, chooses a marathon immersion in Ingmar Bergman, noting – with a dry grin you can almost hear – that he has been accused of morbidity, as if Bergman were not also, in his way, a humorist. The pandemic context is not used for topical resonance, and that restraint is part of the book’s intelligence. Barnes does not want the easy authority of being “of the moment.” Yet “Departure(s)” is haunted by the moment anyway, because the moment is haunted by what the book is about: the collapse of certainty, the ordinary surveillance of health, the thinness of the social world when it is stripped of routine, the way the body’s risks become public mathematics.
Only then does the promised story begin – and Barnes makes that story itself a demonstration of his opening claims. In the mid-1960s, at Oxford, he meets two people, Stephen and Jean. He knows them separately, then introduces them, and watches them fall into love. The early pages of this section contain Barnes’s characteristic braid of tones: affectionate self-mockery, sociological observation, and the faint sting of belated embarrassment. Oxford, he jokes, should perhaps be banned as a setting, as though the institution’s literary overexposure were itself a moral failure. Beneath the joke is a more interesting discomfort: the recognition that youth often happens inside a kind of bubble, and that the bubble does not prevent pain, it merely makes pain feel like a scandal.
Stephen and Jean are drawn with careful economy. Stephen appears tall, awkward, earnest, a young man already practicing adulthood’s habits of order. Jean is restless, socially alive, impatient with stasis. Barnes positions his younger self between them as intermediary and witness, observer and inadvertent participant – the person who will later tell the tale and therefore alter it. Their romance contains a familiar human trap: the false binary. Marry or split. There is, they insist, nothing in between – a youthful absolutism that already sounds like adulthood’s compromises in disguise. Barnes’s treatment of their relationship is tender but unsparing. He is not a romantic in the usual sense. He believes in love, but he does not believe love cancels the rest of the human inventory: vanity, fear, boredom, pride, the craving to be chosen without having to change.
Here “Departure(s)” makes one of its bracing moves. It treats friendship as a site of jealousy and possession, not only romance. Barnes is candid about the ego’s imperialism in intimacy: our tendency to treat other people’s lives as supporting architecture for our own. He brings Stephen and Jean together and, without quite admitting it, invests in their relationship as a kind of proof that life can be made coherent. When it breaks, the narrator’s pain is not only grief for them. It is the shock of discovering how much he had wanted their love to certify his own sense of order. In a culture that has become fluent in romantic grievance and newly celebratory about friendship, Barnes reminds us that friendship has its own betrayals, its own hidden contracts, its own way of making us feel abandoned without providing a socially acceptable language for the wound.
The title’s parenthetical plural matters. This is not a single departure, clean and cinematic. It is a series of exits, some chosen, some imposed, some unnoticed until years later. Stephen and Jean depart from each other. They depart from the narrator. The narrator departs from his younger self, that earlier version of him who could not name his emotional investments. And hovering over all of it is the largest departure, the one the book approaches without theatricality: the departure from the illusion that a life’s central story can be told cleanly, or that any ending will arrive with a satisfying sense of completion.
Decades later Barnes reintroduces Stephen and Jean in a rekindling episode that feels less like fate than like the stubborn persistence of unfinished emotional business. The story arrives in two halves separated by forty years; the method arrives in two textures as well. The later half is supported by notebooks and diaries written close to events, and Barnes is suspicious of these too. Documentation, he suggests, is not truth; it is triage. Notes record what the writer decided was worth saving and what he guessed might be useful later. The diary is not a transcript; it is an early draft. In that sense, the book quietly undermines one of the modern era’s most comforting fantasies: that we can outsmart the unreliability of memory by collecting more evidence. Evidence, Barnes implies, is simply another form of selection, and selection is where the self reveals its bias.
Barnes complicates his position further by acknowledging an ethical snag: he once promised he would never write about these people. He changes names and tells us, plainly, that he is breaking his promise in order to tell the story. In another writer’s hands this might feel like a manufactured frisson, a wink toward transgression. Here it reads as moral accounting. Barnes is less interested in absolution than in accuracy about the nature of his offense. In an era when confession is often treated as cleansing – speak it, post it, move on – Barnes treats confession as complication. The telling does not purify the teller. It only clarifies what the teller is willing to do for the sake of a narrative.
What, then, does “Departure(s)” believe about literature’s powers? Barnes has always lived on the narrow ridge between romantic faith in art and fashionable cynicism about it. He does not endorse the beautiful lie that literature redeems suffering, but he also refuses the easy pose that nothing matters beyond diversion. His humor is real, sometimes wickedly funny, but it is never a dodge. Barnes laughs the way some people pray – an acknowledgement of limits, an antidote to the self’s grandiosity. If “Illness as Metaphor” resisted the symbolic inflation of sickness, and “Being Mortal” offered a humane argument for better endings, Barnes offers something at once narrower and more elusive: a demonstration of how a mind tries to remain honest when it can no longer pretend it has time to lie.
For readers who know Barnes’s earlier work, “Departure(s)” feels like late-career distillation. It echoes the griefwise lucidity of “Levels of Life,” the moral pressure of “The Sense of an Ending,” and the earlier conversation with death in “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” but it is quieter than all three, more interested in relinquishing authority than in winning arguments. It also shares a lineage with late-style books that practice restraint as courage: Didion’s “Blue Nights” in its watchful austerity, Thomas Bernhard’s “Old Masters” in its insistence that brilliance can coexist with abrasion, Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet” in its devotion to interior weather. Barnes is less feverish than any of these writers and less theatrical than his own reputation might suggest. His primary drama is the mind’s refusal to grant itself a simple story.
The contemporary relevance of “Departure(s)” is not topical reference but structural sympathy with the present moment. We live amid chronic conditions – medical, civic, informational – described as manageable rather than solvable. We inhabit archives we did not build and cannot fully control. We are asked to manufacture meaning out of too much data and too little certainty. Barnes declines to manufacture. He insists on the difference between remembering and understanding, and he suggests that our appetite for meaning can become its own form of cruelty: a demand that grief justify itself, that illness become instructive, that love leave behind a clean moral. This is, in a subtle way, an anti-algorithmic book. It does not optimize. It does not persuade with slogans. It sits with ambiguity as though ambiguity were not a failure of thought but the honest condition of it.
There are, inevitably, moments when Barnes’s control risks dulling the messier pulse of feeling. Some readers may wish he would relinquish the intellectual grip and let the story of Stephen and Jean spill beyond its conceptual frame. But that wish may misunderstand Barnes’s temperament. His intimacy has always arrived through analysis. The restraint is the emotion, shaped. If the book sometimes holds the reader at arm’s length, it does so in the name of an ethic that feels increasingly rare: the refusal to manipulate. Barnes does not ask the reader to be moved on schedule. He does not trade in easy catharsis. He offers companionship without insisting on reciprocity, which can feel, at first, like coolness. Over time it begins to feel like respect.
The final coda functions less as an epilogue than as a quiet handshake. Barnes imagines writer and reader sitting together, side by side, not as teacher and pupil but as companions of attention. It is a modest image, almost stubbornly modest, and that stubbornness feels like the book’s last argument. Literature, in this view, is not a ladder out of the human condition. It is a bench in it. A place to sit for a while, to look clearly, and then to stand and leave without pretending the leaving is unique.
My rating for “Departure(s)” is 88 out of 100: not because it is flawless, but because it is rare – a late work that does not coast on reputation, that still argues with itself, that risks awkward honesty, and that still believes style is a form of moral attention. Barnes has always understood that how we tell a story is part of what the story means. Here, he turns that understanding on the hardest material of all: the record inside the skull, the record inside the blood, and the fragile human wish to make a coherent sentence before the lights go out.
October 28, 2025
This is the first book I’ve read by Julian Barnes, and the last one he will write. Julian won the Booker Prize in 2011 with ‘The Sense of an Ending’, and has many novels, short stories, essays and memoirs to his name.
This book has been classed as ‘biographical fiction’ but it’s more like a collection of Julian’s thoughts and musings. It’s a philosophical look at memory, love and death, including Julian’s own memories and references to people he has known or read himself.
The initial section about memories does begin quite scientifically, mentioning Proust and neuropsychology, of which my knowledge is limited. However, this recurring theme of memories runs throughout the whole book and the science behind it all became much clearer as I read on. There were some fascinating facts of which I was completely unaware and now feel all the richer for knowing them.
The love story, in this book, is based on a true story and tells of two people who fell in love when they were young, and when they were older. Julian uses this story to ponder on their relationship, and his role as ‘agony uncle’ within it.
Julian is very aware of his own mortality, and contemplates people he has lost and how they are remembered. He talks about death as if it is an old friend and he is preparing to meet it. It’s a poignant moment when he explains about this being his final book.
You might have noticed a more serious tone to my review today and it’s because this is a serious read. It’s very intellectual at times so I had to slow my reading pace down and really think about what I was I reading, but there were some lighter, more humorous pages interwoven within these. I enjoyed reading it and found it very thought-provoking. I liked Julian’s wit and writing style and would definitely like to read more of his work now.
I was sent a proof copy of this book by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
This book has been classed as ‘biographical fiction’ but it’s more like a collection of Julian’s thoughts and musings. It’s a philosophical look at memory, love and death, including Julian’s own memories and references to people he has known or read himself.
The initial section about memories does begin quite scientifically, mentioning Proust and neuropsychology, of which my knowledge is limited. However, this recurring theme of memories runs throughout the whole book and the science behind it all became much clearer as I read on. There were some fascinating facts of which I was completely unaware and now feel all the richer for knowing them.
The love story, in this book, is based on a true story and tells of two people who fell in love when they were young, and when they were older. Julian uses this story to ponder on their relationship, and his role as ‘agony uncle’ within it.
Julian is very aware of his own mortality, and contemplates people he has lost and how they are remembered. He talks about death as if it is an old friend and he is preparing to meet it. It’s a poignant moment when he explains about this being his final book.
You might have noticed a more serious tone to my review today and it’s because this is a serious read. It’s very intellectual at times so I had to slow my reading pace down and really think about what I was I reading, but there were some lighter, more humorous pages interwoven within these. I enjoyed reading it and found it very thought-provoking. I liked Julian’s wit and writing style and would definitely like to read more of his work now.
I was sent a proof copy of this book by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
January 25, 2026
Not really a novel, but Julian Barnes' musings on memory, aging, death, and writing itself as the 78-year-old mostly-novelist faces the ravages of old age and eventual darkness, struggling with a cancer that won't kill him as long as he treats it.
This is his final book, he says. And a more memorable final good-bye is unimaginable.
Just a final masterpiece by a novelist who spent his life writing masterpieces.
This is his final book, he says. And a more memorable final good-bye is unimaginable.
Just a final masterpiece by a novelist who spent his life writing masterpieces.
January 24, 2026
4.5 stars
January 24, 2026
Incredible writing and use of life, dying and death as themes
January 22, 2026
this memory question being presented in all his books must be studied by scientists
January 23, 2026
All the same , once you lock into its loose, drifting groove and stop resisting its pale variations on a theme, there’s a laidback allure to Barnes’s late approach, as there so often is.
January 4, 2026
I have been lucky enough to get my hands on this before it is released, and as such i am going to have to wait until its release date (end of Jan) to do my full review, as I can’t do it justice without a quote or two
January 11, 2026
If you have read other works of Barnes, then I think you would enjoy this format/style and the insights into Barnes’ life. I personally haven’t read anything else by him and so it just didn’t work for me. I wanted to hear about the story of his friend’s relationship and that actually is a minor storyline in this book.
December 14, 2025
Julian Barnes’s Departure(s) feels less like a book than a final, generous conversation with the reader. It reads unmistakably as a goodbye letter (intimate, playful, and unexpectedly moving) offered without the self-importance so often present in people of his generation. Barnes writes with the ease of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to share.
What makes Departure(s) so affecting is its tone. Barnes is funny in the dry, precise way that has always defined his work, but here the humor feels especially tender, a way of easing both himself and the reader into deeper emotional waters.
The personal anecdotes are the book’s beating heart. Barnes draws on his own experiences with candor. He urges the reader to look inward, but does so gently, without instruction or moralizing, more as a “companion” than a guide.
I loved this book for its honesty. If Departure(s) is indeed Barnes’s last word, it is a beautiful one: thoughtful, intimate, and profoundly human.
What makes Departure(s) so affecting is its tone. Barnes is funny in the dry, precise way that has always defined his work, but here the humor feels especially tender, a way of easing both himself and the reader into deeper emotional waters.
The personal anecdotes are the book’s beating heart. Barnes draws on his own experiences with candor. He urges the reader to look inward, but does so gently, without instruction or moralizing, more as a “companion” than a guide.
I loved this book for its honesty. If Departure(s) is indeed Barnes’s last word, it is a beautiful one: thoughtful, intimate, and profoundly human.
January 24, 2026
Oh god, this is such a good book. I’ve had a long and deep affection for Barnes’s writing. Before I read this, I read a review and it said many things about this book that you might think would be spoilers – except they really aren’t. What it said this book was about – a friendship a bit like that in Talking It Over, sort of, isn’t really what this book is about at all. This is a book about memory. And quite explicitly so. He talks at length about that guy Luria analysed with the terrifyingly photographic memory and repeatedly about Proust’s madeleine cake. The interesting thing about all this is his clear belief – one I share – that too much memory is something to be regretted rather than admired. I’ve just finished watching Pride and Prejudice again and love the bit towards the end where Lizzy says ‘in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable.’
And isn’t that the point of fiction? Not to present a perfect reproduction of the past – Barnes says somewhere at the start of this that it is a book of non-fiction, but also says somewhere else that you should never trust an author when they tell you things about their book. In a book that repeatedly tells us how unreliable memory is, a memoir must be read accordingly. The important part is not the fidelity of the memory, but the truth of the feeling.
Like Barnes, I don’t really trust Proust’s madeleine story – but I was shocked to learn that in earlier drafts of the story it hadn’t been a madeleine at all. My youngest daughter is called Maddy, so, there is that in there for me at least too. But that it could have been a piece of toast or dry bread seemed remarkable to me. Here’s a man who goes off and writes page after page of memories that we are told sprung to him unbidden just by eating a bit of cake with a cup of tea and yet the cake might not have even been a cake in the first place.
I’ve a theory about memory too. That we don’t remember things, but rather we recollect them. I love the idea of ‘re-collecting’, there’s all these bits and we order them in a way that makes sense. A dear friend of mine – now long dead – once told me a funny story, shortly before he died – I can’t dredge it up at the moment, it hardly matters. I laughed and laughed. Then, we were at a pub with the woman who is now the treasurer of the state I live in and I told him to tell her the story too, since I’d found it so brilliantly funny. Ah, but he’d been caught out, and couldn’t remember the version of the story he’d told me or what he’d created to make it quite so funny. He told me to tell it. Except, I really don’t think he had been caught out. We all twist and fix stories as we tell them. It is the joy of being human. To consider such embellishments as ‘lies’ is to totally miss the point. A story told for you, in a way the teller knows you would enjoy, is one of life’s greatest gifts.
There’s a strange feeling you get when an author tells you this will be their last book. A kind of pre-death mourning. The two people he betrays in this by telling their story, of them breaking up as young people, then getting back together again, only to break up again, is interesting, but it is hardly what the book is about. Not that it is not about that, but it is about so much else. My most recent, perhaps last, romantic entanglement was niggling at the back of my mind while I read this – and Barnes’s version of the old line that in any relationship there is a lover and the loved, and we all prefer to be the lover. I guess there are few things more irritating that being loved more than we, ourselves love someone. The problem is that it isn’t necessarily something you can just turn down to the desired level. “Oh, sorry, am I loving you too much, give me a second…”
The review I read of this mentioned Metroland – I’m not sure I knew that was his first novel. I really liked it, but apparently it is virtually overlooked now. The thing I remember most about it is the central character being in France and pretending to be French and annoyed with some English tourists, going over and telling them off as if a Frenchman – only to be forced to meet up with them later and have to admit his deception. Barnes is particularly good at capturing the humiliation of such things. But, as I’ve said, I forgive him anything – this book is more like a fascinating conversation. It is a pity this will be the last of such conversations I will be able to have with this man.
And isn’t that the point of fiction? Not to present a perfect reproduction of the past – Barnes says somewhere at the start of this that it is a book of non-fiction, but also says somewhere else that you should never trust an author when they tell you things about their book. In a book that repeatedly tells us how unreliable memory is, a memoir must be read accordingly. The important part is not the fidelity of the memory, but the truth of the feeling.
Like Barnes, I don’t really trust Proust’s madeleine story – but I was shocked to learn that in earlier drafts of the story it hadn’t been a madeleine at all. My youngest daughter is called Maddy, so, there is that in there for me at least too. But that it could have been a piece of toast or dry bread seemed remarkable to me. Here’s a man who goes off and writes page after page of memories that we are told sprung to him unbidden just by eating a bit of cake with a cup of tea and yet the cake might not have even been a cake in the first place.
I’ve a theory about memory too. That we don’t remember things, but rather we recollect them. I love the idea of ‘re-collecting’, there’s all these bits and we order them in a way that makes sense. A dear friend of mine – now long dead – once told me a funny story, shortly before he died – I can’t dredge it up at the moment, it hardly matters. I laughed and laughed. Then, we were at a pub with the woman who is now the treasurer of the state I live in and I told him to tell her the story too, since I’d found it so brilliantly funny. Ah, but he’d been caught out, and couldn’t remember the version of the story he’d told me or what he’d created to make it quite so funny. He told me to tell it. Except, I really don’t think he had been caught out. We all twist and fix stories as we tell them. It is the joy of being human. To consider such embellishments as ‘lies’ is to totally miss the point. A story told for you, in a way the teller knows you would enjoy, is one of life’s greatest gifts.
There’s a strange feeling you get when an author tells you this will be their last book. A kind of pre-death mourning. The two people he betrays in this by telling their story, of them breaking up as young people, then getting back together again, only to break up again, is interesting, but it is hardly what the book is about. Not that it is not about that, but it is about so much else. My most recent, perhaps last, romantic entanglement was niggling at the back of my mind while I read this – and Barnes’s version of the old line that in any relationship there is a lover and the loved, and we all prefer to be the lover. I guess there are few things more irritating that being loved more than we, ourselves love someone. The problem is that it isn’t necessarily something you can just turn down to the desired level. “Oh, sorry, am I loving you too much, give me a second…”
The review I read of this mentioned Metroland – I’m not sure I knew that was his first novel. I really liked it, but apparently it is virtually overlooked now. The thing I remember most about it is the central character being in France and pretending to be French and annoyed with some English tourists, going over and telling them off as if a Frenchman – only to be forced to meet up with them later and have to admit his deception. Barnes is particularly good at capturing the humiliation of such things. But, as I’ve said, I forgive him anything – this book is more like a fascinating conversation. It is a pity this will be the last of such conversations I will be able to have with this man.
December 27, 2025
“Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.”
(King Lear, 5:2:10-12)
Julian Barnes quotes these lines in his new book, “Departure(s).” It makes perfect sense: the book I am holding in my hands was written by and about an old (which is to say my age) writer who has been diagnosed with cancer and is thinking about his life and his creations and what he remembers. His publisher says the book is fiction, a novel. This may be true: the term has become, let us say, unstable in recent years. Barnes asserts that it will be his last book. This also may be true. It’s almost certainly true, in fact. As I said, Barnes was diagnosed a few years ago with a rare kind of blood cancer. “It isn’t curable,” his doctor told him, "but it is manageable.” (“Incurable yet manageable,” he reflects shortly after learning the diagnosis. “That sounds like… life, doesn’t it?”)
Much of the book -- especially at the beginning -- focuses memory. It begins with Barnes conjuring Marcel Proust’s story in “Swann’s Way” of eating a Madeleine and suddenly being inundated by long-forgotten memories. (No prior knowledge of Proust is necessary.)
(I have to pause here and acknowledge that I’m taking some liberty with the truth. The book actually opens not with Proust but with this: “The other day, I discovered an alarming possibility. No, worse: an alarming fact. I have an old friend, a consultant radiologist, who for years has been sending me clippings from the British Medical Journal. She knows that my interest tends towards the ghoulish and the extreme.” No need to speculate: Barnes gives us a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about.)
But back to Proust. The allusion to “Swann’s Way” sets Barnes off on a lively and eccentric contemplation of memory (“that place where degradation and embellishment overlap.”) Suppose, he posits, you could call to mind everything you’ve done, every thought you've had. “Would you want to know absolutely everything about yourself? Is that a good idea, or a bad one?” An interesting question, particularly (I have to believe) for a writer: “How would you face the record –the chronological record – of all your lies, hypocrisies, cruelties both avoidable and (seemingly) unavoidable, your harsh forgettings, your dissimulations, your broken promises, your infidelities of word and deed? Not just the actual failings but the imagined and desired ones.
“Memory is identity,” he observes more than once in “Departure(s).” Barnes fleshes out the many complexities inherent in the statement. Novelists are story-tellers, and memories the stuff of which their stories are made. But aren't the memories themselves essentially stories themselves? Fabrications “mutating a little with each retelling until it congeals finally into a version which we convince ourselves the truth”? What is fiction in “Departure(s),” and what… well, not fiction? Another good question, but one best left unanswered because it doesn't matter: reading the book is like being in the company of a truly interesting and amusing stranger you’ve just met. Maybe you're sharing a bottle of wine as you listen to him talk about this or that.
That parenthetical addition to the title — “Departure(s) — conveys some sense of what Barnes is up to. He interrupts his discourse on memory to give the reader notice: “Two things to mention at this stage: There will be a story — or a story within the story — but not just yet; and This will be my last book.”
About that story: It involves two people — Stephen and Jean — Barnes met back in college when they were in their 20s. He was instrumental in bringing them together as a couple. In time they broke up but then reentered his life some 40 years later (he is again instrumental in bringing them together). While the story is true, he tells us (though I’m not 100% sure I believe him), Stephen and Jean are not their real names. He promised them “separately” that he would never write about them. (He lied.) Plus, in order to tell a story — “any story” — he has to give “a certain amount of background.” (He breaks the fourth wall and directly speaks to the reader: “Actually, just writing this makes me feel a bit weary. And I wouldn’t blame you if you did too. So I’ll keep most of that stuff to a minimum. You may thank me, or you may not. But as writers get older, either they grow egotistically expansive or they think: contain yourself and cut to the chase.”)
And so he goes in and out of the story of Stephen and Jean (and Jean’s very excitable dog) as they come together, grow apart, come together again, and… so on. Reporting on what they tell him (again separately), what he says in response. They’re difficult people, very different from one another. “I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels, believing I could gently direct them towards the ends which I desired. I’d been confusing life with fiction. I’ll tell you the rest another time.”
Understandably, he keeps coming back to his own situation. His own uncertainly imminent departure. He was writing much of the book during Covid. He penetrates the wall again: “The writer, quarantined in his own home, suddenly victim of blood cancer, while all around a plague is spreading exponentially. It sounds like a bad, or at least derivative, novel.”
He’s careful to stay away from other people as much as he can because he’d “rather die of his own disease, thank you very much, not everybody else’s.’
I imagined myself being rushed to hospital, breathless, speechless, perhaps even unconscious. They see this old geezer and are coming down on the side of straight to ‘end of life care’ when one of them notices that I am wearing a lapel badge. It reads: BUT I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE. And I am reprieved. Unless the gesture looks like an attempt to pull rank, in which case . . . well, I would never find out.
Elsewhere he envisions himself as an old-er man and losing his memory and friends/caretakers, trying to be helpful, suggest that he read his own early books to see if he might recapture who he was (“memory is identity”). They put the headphones on, and you listen to an actor – or perhaps, even, yourself – reading words you had written decades previously. And then what? Does it feel half-familiar? Do you think this must be some book you had read in earlier years? Or might it trigger a genuine memory of writing the words?
So: life, death, writing, fame, love, dreams… (“Departure habitually leads to arrival. Not always, of course… We go, we arrive, we set o in return, and reach home again: we live with this momentum.” Until in the end there is “The Departure which will be followed by no Arrival.”
Barnes reassures the reader that he’s not (or not often) afraid of dying. As an atheist — and support of a group called Dignity in Dying — he doesn’t expect any Thereafter. He shares a story from when catalytic converters were being stolen all the time from cars:
”An old friend and neighbour of mine, disturbed by a noise from the street, opened his bedroom curtains and saw a man half-underneath his car. He rushed down to the front door and shouted ‘What are you up to?’ The man stood up and pointed at him. ‘This has nothing to do with you,’ he said in a threatening manner, ‘Now fuck off back inside.’ Which my friend obediently – and wisely – did. I sometimes think of this incident when I’m musing on illness and decrepitude. It’s just the universe doing its stuff, it has nothing to do with you, so just fuck off back inside, OK? Do you see what I mean?
“…the universe doing its stuff…” Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it many many decades back: “So it goes.”
Do I make the book sound terribly dark and depressing? I hope not because it’s neither of these things, not in the least. It’s touching, profound, playful, tender… Which is not to say the reader won’t finally put the book down with a feeling of sadness of the kind one feels after saying farewell to a beloved friend they may never see again. If “Departure(s)” is in fact to be Barnes’ last novel, it’s a hell of a way to go out.
My thanks to Knopf for a digital ARC of "Departure(S)" in return for an honest review.
(King Lear, 5:2:10-12)
Julian Barnes quotes these lines in his new book, “Departure(s).” It makes perfect sense: the book I am holding in my hands was written by and about an old (which is to say my age) writer who has been diagnosed with cancer and is thinking about his life and his creations and what he remembers. His publisher says the book is fiction, a novel. This may be true: the term has become, let us say, unstable in recent years. Barnes asserts that it will be his last book. This also may be true. It’s almost certainly true, in fact. As I said, Barnes was diagnosed a few years ago with a rare kind of blood cancer. “It isn’t curable,” his doctor told him, "but it is manageable.” (“Incurable yet manageable,” he reflects shortly after learning the diagnosis. “That sounds like… life, doesn’t it?”)
Much of the book -- especially at the beginning -- focuses memory. It begins with Barnes conjuring Marcel Proust’s story in “Swann’s Way” of eating a Madeleine and suddenly being inundated by long-forgotten memories. (No prior knowledge of Proust is necessary.)
(I have to pause here and acknowledge that I’m taking some liberty with the truth. The book actually opens not with Proust but with this: “The other day, I discovered an alarming possibility. No, worse: an alarming fact. I have an old friend, a consultant radiologist, who for years has been sending me clippings from the British Medical Journal. She knows that my interest tends towards the ghoulish and the extreme.” No need to speculate: Barnes gives us a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about.)
But back to Proust. The allusion to “Swann’s Way” sets Barnes off on a lively and eccentric contemplation of memory (“that place where degradation and embellishment overlap.”) Suppose, he posits, you could call to mind everything you’ve done, every thought you've had. “Would you want to know absolutely everything about yourself? Is that a good idea, or a bad one?” An interesting question, particularly (I have to believe) for a writer: “How would you face the record –the chronological record – of all your lies, hypocrisies, cruelties both avoidable and (seemingly) unavoidable, your harsh forgettings, your dissimulations, your broken promises, your infidelities of word and deed? Not just the actual failings but the imagined and desired ones.
“Memory is identity,” he observes more than once in “Departure(s).” Barnes fleshes out the many complexities inherent in the statement. Novelists are story-tellers, and memories the stuff of which their stories are made. But aren't the memories themselves essentially stories themselves? Fabrications “mutating a little with each retelling until it congeals finally into a version which we convince ourselves the truth”? What is fiction in “Departure(s),” and what… well, not fiction? Another good question, but one best left unanswered because it doesn't matter: reading the book is like being in the company of a truly interesting and amusing stranger you’ve just met. Maybe you're sharing a bottle of wine as you listen to him talk about this or that.
That parenthetical addition to the title — “Departure(s) — conveys some sense of what Barnes is up to. He interrupts his discourse on memory to give the reader notice: “Two things to mention at this stage: There will be a story — or a story within the story — but not just yet; and This will be my last book.”
About that story: It involves two people — Stephen and Jean — Barnes met back in college when they were in their 20s. He was instrumental in bringing them together as a couple. In time they broke up but then reentered his life some 40 years later (he is again instrumental in bringing them together). While the story is true, he tells us (though I’m not 100% sure I believe him), Stephen and Jean are not their real names. He promised them “separately” that he would never write about them. (He lied.) Plus, in order to tell a story — “any story” — he has to give “a certain amount of background.” (He breaks the fourth wall and directly speaks to the reader: “Actually, just writing this makes me feel a bit weary. And I wouldn’t blame you if you did too. So I’ll keep most of that stuff to a minimum. You may thank me, or you may not. But as writers get older, either they grow egotistically expansive or they think: contain yourself and cut to the chase.”)
And so he goes in and out of the story of Stephen and Jean (and Jean’s very excitable dog) as they come together, grow apart, come together again, and… so on. Reporting on what they tell him (again separately), what he says in response. They’re difficult people, very different from one another. “I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels, believing I could gently direct them towards the ends which I desired. I’d been confusing life with fiction. I’ll tell you the rest another time.”
Understandably, he keeps coming back to his own situation. His own uncertainly imminent departure. He was writing much of the book during Covid. He penetrates the wall again: “The writer, quarantined in his own home, suddenly victim of blood cancer, while all around a plague is spreading exponentially. It sounds like a bad, or at least derivative, novel.”
He’s careful to stay away from other people as much as he can because he’d “rather die of his own disease, thank you very much, not everybody else’s.’
I imagined myself being rushed to hospital, breathless, speechless, perhaps even unconscious. They see this old geezer and are coming down on the side of straight to ‘end of life care’ when one of them notices that I am wearing a lapel badge. It reads: BUT I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE. And I am reprieved. Unless the gesture looks like an attempt to pull rank, in which case . . . well, I would never find out.
Elsewhere he envisions himself as an old-er man and losing his memory and friends/caretakers, trying to be helpful, suggest that he read his own early books to see if he might recapture who he was (“memory is identity”). They put the headphones on, and you listen to an actor – or perhaps, even, yourself – reading words you had written decades previously. And then what? Does it feel half-familiar? Do you think this must be some book you had read in earlier years? Or might it trigger a genuine memory of writing the words?
So: life, death, writing, fame, love, dreams… (“Departure habitually leads to arrival. Not always, of course… We go, we arrive, we set o in return, and reach home again: we live with this momentum.” Until in the end there is “The Departure which will be followed by no Arrival.”
Barnes reassures the reader that he’s not (or not often) afraid of dying. As an atheist — and support of a group called Dignity in Dying — he doesn’t expect any Thereafter. He shares a story from when catalytic converters were being stolen all the time from cars:
”An old friend and neighbour of mine, disturbed by a noise from the street, opened his bedroom curtains and saw a man half-underneath his car. He rushed down to the front door and shouted ‘What are you up to?’ The man stood up and pointed at him. ‘This has nothing to do with you,’ he said in a threatening manner, ‘Now fuck off back inside.’ Which my friend obediently – and wisely – did. I sometimes think of this incident when I’m musing on illness and decrepitude. It’s just the universe doing its stuff, it has nothing to do with you, so just fuck off back inside, OK? Do you see what I mean?
“…the universe doing its stuff…” Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it many many decades back: “So it goes.”
Do I make the book sound terribly dark and depressing? I hope not because it’s neither of these things, not in the least. It’s touching, profound, playful, tender… Which is not to say the reader won’t finally put the book down with a feeling of sadness of the kind one feels after saying farewell to a beloved friend they may never see again. If “Departure(s)” is in fact to be Barnes’ last novel, it’s a hell of a way to go out.
My thanks to Knopf for a digital ARC of "Departure(S)" in return for an honest review.
January 26, 2026
As for me, I am now seventy-eight, and this will definitely be my last book - my official departure, my final conversation with you. Finishing my last book in my own time and then going silent at least has this useful consequence: it means that you will not be cut off - as Brian Moore feared - in the middle of writing. In this way, you are denying agency to death. Though in a very minor way, admittedly.
A self-consciously hybrid memoir/fiction and explicitly valedictory novel from the now 80 year old English master novelist – winner of the Booker Prize in 2011 for “A Sense of An Ending” after three prior shortlistings (and as an aside in the first of those in 1984 – the judges were in their own words “rather exercised by the question of whether [it] was a novel”.
The first section “ The Great I Am” is a somewhat philosophical treatise on memory – riffing of the phenomena of “involuntary autobiographical memory” (IAM), and taking in Proustian remembrance. The effect, especially when combined with the novel’s later academic-tinged musings on love, often with both a French literary and philosophical lens – was to remind me of an Alain de Botton novel.
It does give my personal favourite passage of the novel.
Probably not. But then I have never found myself, as Marcel was, frustrated by the limits of the intellect's memory; and I doubt that if I could reaccess Acton W3 in the late 1940s and early 50s, all would open like a Japanese flower in water, reminding me of forgotten things and forgotten happiness. Nor can I guess what sudden olfactory key might work on me: certainly not a fortuitous morsel of soggy cake. More likely the smell of the glue and varnish I used when constructing model aircraft, or the aroma of frying bacon, or that of a damp golden retriever.
As an aside though, and even as a dog lover, I felt that later sections around a Jack Russell he encounters and then inherits from a friend (Jean below) after her death – were not that well done at all, and seemed almost trite in their insight and unnecessary in their frequency.
The second section “The Beginning of the Story” together with the fourth “The End of the Story” tell what is introduced as a story which “comes in two parts, as it was lived in two parts, with a long gap between them” – what Barnes claims, at least in the novel, is a true story albeit anonymised of a couple Stephen and Jean who he first introduces at Oxford where they form and then break a relationship (Barnes something of a third wheel) and then, some 40 years later when he facilitates a re-introduction one which ends in a marriage (at which he is feted for his role) before dissolving again as the couple realise again their essential emotional incompatibility.
At times these sections are perhaps too conveniently meta-fictional – Stephen and Jean asking perhaps too often that Barnes does not write about them – although I guess also that is probably what happens when you are a world-famous novelist known for writing of affairs of the heart and it does lead to some delightful lines, one of which I think will be the most quoted of the novel.
'I like some of your books but not others.'
"That's hardly surprising'
"This hybrid stuff you do - I think it's a mistake. You should do one thing or the other.'
In the old days, I might have said, 'Well, at least you like some of my books.' Now I said, firmly: "I don't mind you not liking my books, but you are mistaken if you think I don't know exactly what I'm up to when I write them.'
A third section “Manageable” tells of Barnes diagnosis, in early COVID, of incurable but mitigatable blood cancer.
The fifth “Going Nowhere” brings the strands together, examines the roles and limitations of literature and ends with a really well-judged farewell from Barnes explicitly addressed to his readers.
If I had a critical observation here it is that a self-proclaimed atheist/agnostic’s outlook on death (and for that matter life), especially when he seems to understand surprisingly little of religion (there is a passage on what he considers odd comments by Jimmy Carter which I found odd in his writing) – is necessarily rather bleak and in my view unenlightened (literally).
January 23, 2026
Julian Barnes turned 80 on January 19, the day before this book was published. And it is so very much a Julian Barnes book, one difficult to categorize as either fiction or non-fiction, which the narrator’s friend would undoubtedly dismiss as “’This hybrid stuff you do.’”
The narrator is a writer named Julian Barnes who states that what we are reading will be his last book. He begins with a lengthy discussion of memory, how it works and its fallibility. Promising that there will be a story, or a story within the story, he eventually tells the story of two friends, Jean and Stephen, for whom he played matchmaker, once in the 1960s and again 40 years later. This narrative feels less of a plot and more a device for examining love. The latter part of the book is a reflection of the narrator’s life (his writing career, the deaths of his wife and friends, his diagnosis with blood cancer, the ravishes of aging, and his eventual death). The book closes with a farewell to his readers.
I’ve really liked several of Barnes’ novels and this one was no exception. I enjoyed reading his thoughts about memory, love, grief, and death. Perhaps because I am only a decade away from his age, his reflections resonated with me. I especially liked his way of accepting life’s vicissitudes and one’s inevitable death: it’s just the universe doing its stuff.
At the end, the narrator addresses the reader directly and imagines the writer and reader sitting side by side at a cafe, watching and musing at the lives passing by. Throughout, the narrator speaks in a relaxed voice as if indeed the reader and writer are having a conversation – though he admits to seldom catching the reader’s mutterings since he imagines the reader sitting on his deaf side. As such conversations between companions do, this one meanders with digressions touching on both serious and trivial topics.
The serious topics outnumber the inconsequential, but there are definite touches of humour. The discussions about Jimmy, a Jack Russell, are often hilarious. I chuckled at Julian’s description of his triage fantasy: imagining that during Covid, he’d be dismissed as an old geezer relegated to end-of-life care until someone notices his lapel badge announcing his winning of the Booker Prize. And I loved his jabs at Trump, commenting it would be appropriate if he’d sworn on a copy of the Wicked Bible which commands “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The title is perfect. The narrator has experienced the departure of memories, has had some people in his life leave temporarily and some die, and he gives more than passing thought to his own departure from life. And is he saying goodbye to his writing career? The narrator emphasizes how writers lie and don’t keep promises, like the one he made to Jean and Stephen to never write about them. So should we take Barnes’s statement, about this being his last book, at face value?
I hope this is not his last book, but if it is, it is a good one to mark the end of his career. And though I won’t stop looking at “the many and varied expressions of life,” I’ll miss his “sturdy presence” and “conversational mutterings.”
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/).
The narrator is a writer named Julian Barnes who states that what we are reading will be his last book. He begins with a lengthy discussion of memory, how it works and its fallibility. Promising that there will be a story, or a story within the story, he eventually tells the story of two friends, Jean and Stephen, for whom he played matchmaker, once in the 1960s and again 40 years later. This narrative feels less of a plot and more a device for examining love. The latter part of the book is a reflection of the narrator’s life (his writing career, the deaths of his wife and friends, his diagnosis with blood cancer, the ravishes of aging, and his eventual death). The book closes with a farewell to his readers.
I’ve really liked several of Barnes’ novels and this one was no exception. I enjoyed reading his thoughts about memory, love, grief, and death. Perhaps because I am only a decade away from his age, his reflections resonated with me. I especially liked his way of accepting life’s vicissitudes and one’s inevitable death: it’s just the universe doing its stuff.
At the end, the narrator addresses the reader directly and imagines the writer and reader sitting side by side at a cafe, watching and musing at the lives passing by. Throughout, the narrator speaks in a relaxed voice as if indeed the reader and writer are having a conversation – though he admits to seldom catching the reader’s mutterings since he imagines the reader sitting on his deaf side. As such conversations between companions do, this one meanders with digressions touching on both serious and trivial topics.
The serious topics outnumber the inconsequential, but there are definite touches of humour. The discussions about Jimmy, a Jack Russell, are often hilarious. I chuckled at Julian’s description of his triage fantasy: imagining that during Covid, he’d be dismissed as an old geezer relegated to end-of-life care until someone notices his lapel badge announcing his winning of the Booker Prize. And I loved his jabs at Trump, commenting it would be appropriate if he’d sworn on a copy of the Wicked Bible which commands “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The title is perfect. The narrator has experienced the departure of memories, has had some people in his life leave temporarily and some die, and he gives more than passing thought to his own departure from life. And is he saying goodbye to his writing career? The narrator emphasizes how writers lie and don’t keep promises, like the one he made to Jean and Stephen to never write about them. So should we take Barnes’s statement, about this being his last book, at face value?
I hope this is not his last book, but if it is, it is a good one to mark the end of his career. And though I won’t stop looking at “the many and varied expressions of life,” I’ll miss his “sturdy presence” and “conversational mutterings.”
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/).
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