Nothing to be Frightened Of

Both fun and funny. It is sharp too, in the sense of painful as well as witty… Barnes dissects with tremendous verve and insight this awesome inevitability of death and its impact on the human psyche. He also tears at your heart * New Statesman *
A maverick form of family memoir that is mainly an extended reflection on the fear of death and on that great consolation, religious belief… It is entertaining, intriguing, absorbing…an inventive and invigorating slant on what is nowadays called ‘life writing’. It took me hours to write this review because each reference to my notes set me off rereading; that is a reviewer’s ultimate accolade – Penelope Lively * Financial Times *
A brilliant bible of elegant despair…that most urgent kind of self-help manual: the one you must read before you die – Tim Adams * Vogue *
Intensely fascinating * The Times *
An elegant memoir and meditation. A deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter * Garrison Keillor *
An essay in the best sense: speculative and precise, intimate and metaphysical, capacious and democratic in the variety of voices, alive and dead, that are invited to counsel the author as he edges his way towards the void * TLS *
Intensely serious book of striking elegance: a clever, complicated reverie on last things, so full of ideas as to reveal itself quite slowly, through frequent re-reading – Jane Shilling * Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year *
A fantastic work of non-fiction, a showcase for his elegantly unfussy sentences and Barnes’s ability to burrow to the very bottom of a subject, no matter how daunting – Colin Waters * The Sunday Herald *
Julian Barnes takes on the ambitious subject of death - and succeeds brilliantly – William Leith * Scotsman *
It is a sincere, humble work, punctuated by moments of poignancy – Colm Farren * The Irish Times *

Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize, 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 five works of non-fiction, including Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Legion d’honneur in 2017.

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