Staring at the Sun

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending traces the life of a seemingly ordinary woman with an extraordinary disdain for wisdom in this "marvelous literary epiphany" (The New York Times Book Review).

In this wonderfully provocative novel, Barnes follows Jean Serjeant from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, confronting readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed).

Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original.


About the Author
Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.