Metroland - (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes (Paperback)

About the Book

Only the author of Flaubert's Parrot could give us a novel that is at once a note-perfect rendition of the angsts and attitudes of English adolescence, a giddy comedy of sexual awakening in the 1960s, and a portrait of the accommodations that some of us call "growing up" and others "selling out". "Barnes writes like a dream".--Village Voice Literary Supplement.

Book Synopsis

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of A Sense of an Ending comes a comedy of sexual awakening in the 1960s that is "wonderfully fresh, crackling with nostalgic irreverence" (Vogue).

Only the author of Flaubert's Parrot could give us a novel that is at once a note-perfect rendition of the angsts and attitudes of English adolescence, a giddy comedy of sexual awakening, and a portrait of the accommodations that some of us call "growing up" and others "selling out.

Review Quotes

"One would have to look hard to find a wryer, more lovingly detailed account of intellectual and secual innocence abroad.... Metroland portrays at once the disturbing aspects of adulthood and the consolations of maturity, a balance that makes one glad Julian Barnes is still young and still writing." --The New York Times

"Wonderfully fresh, crackling with nostalgic irreverence." --Vogue

"Barnes's books ... celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions.... They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: esthetic bliss." --Chicago Sun-Times

"If all works of fiction were as thoughtful, as subtle, as well constructed, and as funny as Metroland, there would be no more talk of the death of the novel." --New Statesman

"Julian Barnes is one of a handful of innovative English novelists who have succeeded in pulling the English novel out of the provincial rut in which it lay." --Newsday

"Flighty, playful ... Barnes succeeds in vividly re-creating teenage precociousness, particularly what it feels like to be a young male encountering love and sex." --Los Angeles Times

"Barnes writes like a dream." --Village Voice Literary Supplement

About the Author

Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.