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Before he published a novel, Julian Barnes spent three years as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary supplement, where he worked on sports words and dirty words. His first novel, Metroland, came out in 1980; that same decade he also wrote four crime novels as Dan Kavanagh. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before he won it in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, a short novel about a retired man who gets a letter about a diary. On 20 January 2026, the day after his 80th birthday, he published Departure(s) and said it would be his last book. This guide covers his 14 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 1980–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Julian Barnes has published about 32 books, 15 of them novels under his own name. The best known are The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Booker Prize, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Arthur & George (2005) and his grief memoir Levels of Life (2013). Start with The Sense of an Ending: it is short, and it holds most of what he returns to, from memory to the stories people tell about their own lives.
Where to Start with Julian Barnes
If you want his defining book
→ The Sense of an Ending (2011) — the 2011 Booker winner, about 150 pages.
If you want the playful, experimental Barnes
→ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) — a novel that is also a biography of Flaubert.
If you want a historical novel
→ Arthur & George (2005) — Arthur Conan Doyle takes up a real miscarriage of justice.
If you want his writing on grief
→ Levels of Life (2013) — history, fiction and memoir in three parts.
14 Julian Barnes Books, in Order
Metroland
Christopher Lloyd and his friend Toni are clever, scornful schoolboys in the London suburbs along the Metropolitan line, who want to shock the bourgeoisie. The novel follows Christopher to Paris in 1968 and back to the suburbs as a married man. It won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1981 and was filmed in 1997 with Christian Bale and Emily Watson.
Flaubert’s Parrot
Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor, goes to Rouen and finds two stuffed parrots, each claimed to be the one Flaubert kept on his desk while writing “A Simple Heart”. The book mixes chronologies, a bestiary, an exam paper and a dictionary of received ideas into a biography of Flaubert, and slowly into Braithwaite’s own story. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and in France won the Prix Médicis essai in 1986.
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
Ten pieces and a half-chapter “Parenthesis” on love, connected by the story of Noah’s Ark. The first chapter is told by a woodworm that stowed away on the Ark; others include animals put on trial and a version of the afterlife.
Talking It Over
Stuart, his old friend Oliver and Gillian, the woman both men love, take turns to speak directly to the reader, each giving their own version of what happened when Oliver fell for Stuart’s wife. Published in France as Love, etc., it won the Prix Femina étranger in 1992 and was filmed under that title in 1996. Barnes returned to the three characters in Love, etc (2000).
England, England
The tycoon Sir Jack Pitman turns the Isle of Wight into a theme park of everything people think of as English, from the royal family to Robin Hood, and the replica slowly outdoes the original. Much of the story is seen through Martha Cochrane, who works for him. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The Lemon Table
Eleven stories about getting old and facing death, with characters ranging from a retired couple to the composer Jean Sibelius in his last silent decades. The title comes from the lemon as a Chinese symbol of death.
Arthur & George
Two lives in Edwardian England: Arthur Conan Doyle, and George Edalji, the son of a Parsi vicar in Staffordshire, a solicitor wrongly convicted of maiming animals. When Conan Doyle takes up the case, the two stories meet. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2005, and in 2015 it became a three-part ITV series with Martin Clunes as Conan Doyle.
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
A memoir about the fear of death that opens with the line “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” Barnes writes about his parents’ deaths and argues with his older brother, the philosopher Jonathan Barnes, alongside the writers and composers who thought about dying before him. It won the Yasnaya Polyana Prize in 2021.
The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster, retired and divorced, has settled into a quiet life when a solicitor’s letter tells him that the mother of his student girlfriend, Veronica, has left him £500 and a diary belonging to his school friend Adrian, who killed himself in his twenties. Trying to get the diary back forces Tony to revise what he remembers of his youth. It won the Booker Prize in 2011, his fourth time on the shortlist, and was filmed in 2017 with Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling.
Levels of Life
A book in three parts: a history of nineteenth-century ballooning and the photographer Nadar, a story of a love affair between the balloonist Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt, and a memoir of grief after the death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, in 2008.
The Noise of Time
A novel about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich under Soviet rule, built around three moments when he has to deal with power. It opens in 1936, after Pravda has condemned his opera, with Shostakovich waiting by the lift of his apartment block with a packed suitcase, expecting to be arrested at night.
The Only Story
In the early 1960s, in the commuter belt outside London, 19-year-old Paul is paired with Susan Macleod, a married woman of 48, in a mixed doubles tournament at the tennis club, and they fall in love. Looking back as an old man, Paul tells the story of their life together and of Susan’s slide into alcoholism, moving from “I” to “you” to “he” as it becomes harder to tell.
Elizabeth Finch
Neil, a former actor, takes an adult-education course in culture and civilisation taught by Elizabeth Finch and stays her lunch companion for some twenty years. When she dies and leaves him her notebooks, he writes the essay he never handed in, on the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, which forms the middle of the book.
Departure(s)
Barnes, writing as himself, tells what he says is a true story: Stephen and Jean, a couple from his Oxford years in the 1960s, whom he helped bring back together some forty years later. Around it he writes about memory and about living with the incurable but manageable blood cancer he was diagnosed with in 2020. Published the day after his 80th birthday, it was announced as his last book.
In What Order to Read Julian Barnes
Apart from Talking It Over and its sequel Love, etc, none of his books continue from one another, so you can read in any order. Publication order shows a shift, though: the 1980s and 1990s books play with form, from the Flaubert exam paper to the woodworm on the Ark, and the later books turn to memory, love and death in plainer, shorter novels.
Read Talking It Over before Love, etc, which picks up the same three characters ten years on. If you read Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Levels of Life and Departure(s) in sequence, they form a loose trilogy of his non-fiction about death, grief and his own illness.
A reading path
1. The Sense of an Ending (2011)
2. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
3. Arthur & George (2005)
4. Levels of Life (2013)
5. Departure(s) (2026)
Everything Else Julian Barnes Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 18 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
4
4 books · 1982–2000
- 1982Before She Met Mea historian becomes jealous of his wife’s past as a film actress
- 1986Staring at the Sunone woman’s life across the twentieth century and beyond
- 1992The Porcupinethe trial of a deposed communist leader in an Eastern European country
- 2000Love, etcthe sequel to Talking It Over
Short story collections
2
2 books · 1996–2011
- 1996Cross Channelstories of the English in France
- 2011Pulsestories including dinner-party conversations among friends
Essays and non-fiction
8
8 books · 1995–2025
- 1995Letters from Londonhis London pieces for The New Yorker
- 2002Something to Declareessays on France and French writers
- 2003The Pedant in the Kitchenon cooking from recipe books
- 2012Through the Windowessays on writers, mostly European
- 2012A Life with Booksa short piece on reading and books
- 2015Keeping an Eye Openessays on art, updated in 2020
- 2019The Man in the Red Coatthe Belle Époque surgeon Samuel Pozzi
- 2025Changing My Mindshort essays on changing one’s mind
Crime novels as Dan Kavanagh
4
4 books · 1980–1987
- 1980Duffythe first Duffy novel
- 1981Fiddle CityDuffy at Heathrow
- 1985Putting the Boot InDuffy in football
- 1987Going to the Dogsthe last Duffy novel
The years · 1946–2026
Quick facts about Julian Barnes
- Known for
- Julian Barnes is known for short, formally inventive novels about memory, love and death, above all the Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending.
- 1946
- Born in Leicester
- 1980
- First novel, Metroland
- 1984
- Flaubert’s Parrot, his first Booker shortlist
- 2011
- The Sense of an Ending wins the Booker
- 2026
- Departure(s), announced as his last book
- Born
- 19 January 1946, Leicester; both parents were French teachers
- Education
- City of London School; modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford
- Worked
- Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer, then critic and literary editor
- Married
- The literary agent Pat Kavanagh (1979–her death in 2008); Rachel Cugnoni (2025)
- Pseudonym
- Dan Kavanagh, for four crime novels in the 1980s
- Prizes
- Booker Prize (2011), David Cohen Prize (2011), Jerusalem Prize (2021), Princess of Asturias Award (2026)
- Honours
- Officier of the Légion d’honneur (2017)
The red mark is 2011: The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize on his fourth shortlisting.
How Julian Barnes Writes: Memory on Trial
Barnes’s narrators are usually looking back, and the books test whether they can be trusted. Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending has to revise his own account of his youth; Paul in The Only Story moves from “I” to “you” to “he” as the memories get harder; in Talking It Over three people give the reader conflicting versions of the same events.
He also likes to mix forms. Flaubert’s Parrot includes a chronology, a bestiary and an exam paper; A History of the World in 10½ Chapters starts with a woodworm on the Ark; Levels of Life and Elizabeth Finch put history, essay and fiction side by side; Departure(s) blurs the line between memoir and story. France runs through all of it, from Flaubert to Dr Pozzi in The Man in the Red Coat, and French juries have given him the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina.
From the late 2000s, death and grief became his subjects directly: Nothing to Be Frightened Of on the fear of dying, Levels of Life after the death of his wife, and Departure(s) written while living with blood cancer. The sentences stay dry and exact, with jokes in the darkest places.
Frequently asked questions about Julian Barnes’s books
How many books has Julian Barnes written?
About 32, not counting translations. This page covers his 14 key books, from Metroland (1980) to Departure(s) (2026); the other 18 are four more novels, two story collections, eight books of essays and non-fiction, and four crime novels written as Dan Kavanagh.
What are Julian Barnes’s books in order?
The key books are Metroland (1980), Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Talking It Over (1991), England, England (1998), The Lemon Table (2004), Arthur & George (2005), Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), The Sense of an Ending (2011), Levels of Life (2013), The Noise of Time (2016), The Only Story (2018), Elizabeth Finch (2022) and Departure(s) (2026).
Where should I start with Julian Barnes?
The Sense of an Ending (2011). It is short, it won the Booker Prize, and it shows his main subject, how memory rewrites a life. If you prefer something more playful, try Flaubert’s Parrot.
What is Julian Barnes’s most famous book?
The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize in 2011 and was filmed in 2017 with Jim Broadbent. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is the book that made his name.
Did Julian Barnes win the Booker Prize?
Yes, once: in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. He had been shortlisted three times before, for Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), England, England (1998) and Arthur & George (2005).
Which Julian Barnes books have been adapted?
Metroland was filmed in 1997 with Christian Bale and Emily Watson; Talking It Over became the French film Love, etc. (1996); Arthur & George was a three-part ITV series in 2015 with Martin Clunes; and The Sense of an Ending was filmed in 2017 by Ritesh Batra, with Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling.
Who is Dan Kavanagh?
A pseudonym Barnes used for four crime novels about Duffy, a bisexual former policeman turned private detective: Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985) and Going to the Dogs (1987).
Is Departure(s) Julian Barnes’s last book?
He has said so. Departure(s) was published on 20 January 2026, the day after his 80th birthday, and in it he writes about living with a rare blood cancer diagnosed in 2020.
Why did Julian Barnes and Martin Amis fall out?
In the mid-1990s Martin Amis left his agent, Pat Kavanagh, who was Barnes’s wife, for the American agent Andrew Wylie, around the time of a reported advance of about £500,000 for The Information (1995). The two had been close friends, and the rift was played out in public.
Is Julian Barnes still alive?
Yes. He was born on 19 January 1946 in Leicester and turned 80 in January 2026. In June 2026 he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature.
Footnotes
- Julian Barnes — Wikipedia
- Julian Barnes: where to start — Penguin
- Julian Barnes, Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2026 — Fundación Princesa de Asturias
- Departure(s): reviews — The Week, 2026
- The Only Story — NPR, 2018
- Levels of Life reader’s guide — Penguin Random House
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later.”
— Julian Barnes, Levels of Life (2013)
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