The Lemon Table

All [the stories] are a joy to read as Barnes glides between forms…Each story is distinct and indelible, a tribute to the form. Above all they make you think about growing old and what, if anything, can be done about it. * Glasgow Herald *
All have a photographic clarity, a psychological realism that embraces extremes of feeling…with a deliciously wry streak * Observer *
Barnes’s steely wit finds best expression when inhabiting the anguished and angry… Their brilliance rather plays upon our petty furies and failures, embellishing them with self-deprecatory wryness…entrancing and curiously cheering * New Statesman *
Masterly…his best stories have a strong air of Maupassant about them…extraordinarily effective…a compelling series of vignettes of old age, executed with great skill * Daily Telegraph *
Splendid, beautiful…reads like Turgenev * Spectator *
Admirably unsweetened by saccharine sentimentality…exhilaratingly crisp, crystallised by Barnes’s wintry intelligence… The clean, acidic accuracy of Barnes’s writing is supremely enjoyable * Sunday Telegraph *
Taken together, these tales present a powerful account of the snatched joys and encumbrances of decrepitude in well-turned prose that brings wit, charm and gravity to its theme * Financial 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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