Cross Channel - Couverture rigide

'Few writers think and talk so beguilingly'
Zoe Heller, Independent on Sunday

No one has a better perspective to see things from both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories, which span several centuries, he takes as his central theme the British in France: from the last days of a reclusive English composer and the beef consuming 'navvies' labouring on the Paris-Rouen railway, to a lonely woman mourning the death of her brother on the battlefields of the Somme.

Clever, wise, reflective and imaginative, these stories are permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations from these islands to cross the Channel.

'Julian Barnes, who has an exceptional following in France, seems to have done more for Anglo-French relations than anyone since Edward VII'
Sunday Telegraph

‘Mind-blowing…there is no more gifted writer writing today’
Le Figaro

This is a collection of ten short stories with a linking theme: the British in France through several centuries. It opens with a group of mercenary soldiers engaged in a punitive expedition against a Protestant village in southern France in the late seventeenth century, and closes with a journey on the antiquated Eurostar express to Paris in the year 2015.

In between the British appear in their various guises: as railway-builders in the 1840s, vineyard-owners at the turn of the century, artistic exiles in the 1920s. There is a story (based upon fact) about the departure of an English cricket team to play the Gentlemen of France in 1789; one about a literary conference in the Massif Central which may or may not have taken place; one about a Tour de France cyclist.

The stories are designed to play off one another and work exploring the British fascination with France, our various and mixed reasons for being there, and our sometimes ambiguous reception.