Staring at the Sun

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.