Cross Channel - Couverture souple

'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

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and educated in London and Oxford. He worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, then as a journalist for the New Statesman, the Sunday Times and the Observer. He is the author of eight novels, a collection of essays, a book of short stories, and is the first Englishman to have won both the Prix Medicis and the Prix Femina. In 1988 he was made a Chevalier and in 1995 he became an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.