Art and Power collide in Julian Barnes's first novel since the
Booker-winning The Sense of An Ending
A Daily Telegraph / Financial Times / Guardian / Sunday Times /
The Times / New Statesman / Observer Book of the Year
Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and four works of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Legion d'Honneur in 2017.
A great novel, Barnes’s masterpiece… Exquisite, intimate detail. He
has given us a novel that is powerfully affecting, a condensed
masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man’s
conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of
totalitarianism.
*Observer*
Barnes’s sombre, brilliant new novel opens with a scene like
something from a story by Chekhov… Gleaming with intelligence and
literary flair, this elegantly composed fictional meditation offers
a fresh gloss on a musical genius’s collisions and collusions with
power.
*Sunday Times*
[Barnes is] a master of the narrative sidestep… Not just a novel
about music, but something more like a musical novel… The story
itself is structured in three parts that come together like a
broken chord. It is a simple but brilliant device, and one that
goes right to the heart of this novel.
*The Times*
A compelling novel about art and power, courage and cowardice, and
the capriciousness of fate…Barnes brilliantly captures the
composer’s conflicted state of mind…This book is only 190 pages
long, but it packs an extraordinary emotional punch.
*Tatler*
The writing in the early pages is magnificent… The reader has the
confidence of being in the hands of a master storyteller… Barnes
has a good sense of what life was like in the Soviet Union. He
captures well the black humor, irony and cynicism.
*New York Review of Books*
Julian Barnes’ novel deftly evokes the complexity of Shostakovich’s
relationship with Stalin and the power of his oeuvre… Thick with
period detail… The book returns us to the music itself, that
immense 20th-century oeuvre that contains everything but confirms
nothing.
*Financial Times*
Gripping… An intimately illuminating montage of Shostakovich’s
life… Immediately engaging.
*Guardian*
A novel of deceptive slenderness... You expect nothing less from a
writer soaked in Flaubert.
*Daily Telegraph*
A series of elegant insights into the mind of a brilliant artist…
Throughout, Barnes offers a surety of touch that few writers can
match.
*Independent on Sunday*
[A] sad, self-lacerating and darkly funny hybrid of a novel. The
Noise of Time is both a burrowing meditation on an artist’s
lifelong relationship with totalitarian power, fear and compromise,
and a fascinating fictional biography of one of the 20th century’s
greatest composers… Barnes is a master.
*The National*
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