Audiobooks by Julian Barnes

[Spanish] - El loro de Flaubert Audiobook

Un despliegue de gran audacia técnica y elegante virtuosismo, al servicio de una amenísima trama en la que se alterna la ficción con hechos reales muy imaginativamente ordenados. Un libro que ha tenido un extraordinario éxito, tanto en Inglaterra como en Estados Unidos, y no sólo de crítica, sino también de ventas, lo cual resulta algo insólito teniendo en cuenta su carácter descaradamente literario. Esta novela no trata sólo del loro que aparecía en Un coeur simple, sino también de ferrocarriles y de osos; de Francia y de Inglaterra; de la vida y del arte; del sexo y de la muerte; de George Sand y de Louise Colet; de los (odiados) estudiosos de la obra de Flaubert y de las virtudes del lector «aficionado». Y todo ello de la pluma de un enigmático narrador, el doctor Braithwaite (un apasionado de Flaubert que llega a escribir su propio sottisier basado en el Dictionnaire des idées reçues), cuya vida y secretos nos son progresivamente desvelados. El loro de Flaubert ha provocado un auténtico alud de críticas entusiastas. Ante el embarras du choix nos limitamos a reproducir los comentarios de una serie de escritores lo suficientemente conocidos como para no precisar mayores explicaciones: «Un logro deslumbrante. Tan notablemente inventivo como audaz» (Walter Abish). «Delicioso y enriquecedor. ¡Un libro para irse con él de parranda!» (Joseph Heller) «Una novela intrincadamente deliciosa» (Graham Greene). «Alimento inacabable para la mente, hermosamente escrito. Un tour de force» (Germaine Greer). «Una joya: una novela literaria que no se avergüenza de serlo y tampoco de ser legible y extraordinariamente entretenida. ¡Bravo!» (John Irving) «El loro de Flaubert, c'est moi!» (Fran Lebowitz).

Julian Barnes (Author), Pablo Adán (Narrator)

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Staring at the Sun

Brought to you by Penguin. Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides. © Julian Barnes 1986 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Julian Barnes (Author), Alix Dunmore (Narrator)

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England, England

Brought to you by Penguin. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. Grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. He constructs on the island 'The Project', a vast heritage centre containing everything 'English', from Big Ben to Stonehenge, from Manchester United to the white cliffs of Dover. The project is monstrous, risky, and vastly successful. In fact, it gradually begins to rival 'Old' England and even threatens to supersede it... One of Barnes's finest and funniest novels, England, England calls into question the idea of replicas, truth vs fiction, reality vs art, nationhood, myth-making, and self-exploration. 'A brilliant, Swiftian fantasy' The Economist © Julian Barnes 1996 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Julian Barnes (Author), Julian Wadham (Narrator)

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The Porcupine

Brought to you by Penguin. Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Party leader of a former Soviet satellite country, is on trial. His adversary, the prosecutor general, stands for the new government's ideals and liberal certainties, and is attempting to ensare Petkanov with the dictator's own totalitarian laws. But Petkanov is not beaten yet. He has been given his chance to fight back and he takes it with a vengeance, to the increasing discomfort and surprise of those around him. © Julian Barnes 1992 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Julian Barnes (Author), Daniel Rigby (Narrator)

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Before She Met Me

Brought to you by Penguin. Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Graham Hendrick, an historian, has left his wife Barbara for the vivacious Ann, and is more than pleased with his new life. Until, that is, the day he discovers Ann's celluloid past as a mediocre film actress. Soon Graham is pouncing on old clues, examining her books for inscriptions from past lovers, frequenting cinemas and poring over the bad movies she appeared in. It's not that he blames Anne for having a past before they met, but history has always mattered to him... © Julian Barnes 1982 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Julian Barnes (Author), David Bark-Jones (Narrator)

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Cross Channel

Brought to you by Penguin. From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes an enthralling set of short stories. No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories spanning several centuries, he takes as his universal theme the British in France; from the last days of a reclusive English composer, 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. © Julian Barnes 1996 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Julian Barnes (Author), Charles Armstrong (Narrator)

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The Pedant in the Kitchen

Brought to you by Penguin. The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant's true pedantry emerges. How big, exactly, is a 'lump'? Is a 'slug' larger than a 'gout'? When does a 'drizzle' become a downpour? And what is the difference between slicing and chopping?This book is a witty and practical account of Julian Barnes' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton's Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss. © Julian Barnes 2003 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Julian Barnes (Author), David Rintoul (Narrator)

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Lives of Houses

A group of notable writers—including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow—celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, a group of notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past. Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home—from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London. With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home. Featuring Alexandra Harris on moving house ● Susan Walker on Morocco's ancient Roman House of Venus ● Hermione Lee on biographical quests for writers’ houses ● Margaret Macmillan on her mother's Toronto house ● a poem by Maura Dooley, 'Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts'—the house in which Louisa May Alcott wrote and set her novel Little Women ● Felicity James on William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage ● Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at home with Tennyson ● David Cannadine on Winston Churchill's dream house, Chartwell ● Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear at San Remo's Villa Emily ● Lucy Walker on Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh, England ● Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City ● Rebecca Bullard on Samuel Johnson's houses ● a poem by Simon Armitage, 'The Manor' ● Daisy Hay at home with the Disraelis ● Laura Marcus on H. G. Wells at Uppark ● Alexander Masters on the fear of houses ● Elleke Boehmer on sites associated with Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera ● Kate Kennedy on the mental asylums where World War I poet Ivor Gurney spent the last years of his life ● a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue, 'Safe Houses' ● Roy Foster on W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee ● Sandra Mayer on W. H. Auden's Austrian home ● Gillian Darley on John Soane and the autobiography of houses ● Julian Barnes on Sibelius and Ainola

Jenny Uglow, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, Margaret Macmillan, Simon Armitage (Author), Hermione Lee, Kate Kennedy, Lisa Coleman, Phyllida Nash, Richard Pryal (Narrator)

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The Man in the Red Coat

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The three men's lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker, a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life. The Man in the Red Coat is at once a fresh and original portrait of the French Belle Epoque - its heroes and villains, its writers, artists and thinkers - and a life of a man ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, the new book from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive.

Julian Barnes (Author), Saul Reichlin (Narrator)

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The Man in the Red Coat

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The three men's lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker, a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, The Man in the Red Coat illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive.

Julian Barnes (Author), Russell Bentley, Saul Reichlin (Narrator)

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Die einzige Geschichte (Ungekürzte Lesung)

Die erste Liebe hat lebenslange Konsequenzen, aber davon hat Paul im Alter von neunzehn keine Ahnung. Mit neunzehn ist er stolz, dass seine Liebe zur verheirateten, fast dreißig Jahre älteren Susan die gesellschaftlichen Konventionen sprengt. Er ist sich ganz sicher, in Susan die Frau fürs Leben gefunden zu haben, alles andere ist nebensächlich. Erst mit zunehmendem Alter wird Paul klar, dass die Anforderungen, die die Liebe an ihn stellt, größer sind, als er es jemals für möglich gehalten hätte.

Julian Barnes (Author), Frank Arnold (Narrator)

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The Only Story: A novel

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of An Ending, a novel about a young man on the cusp of adulthood and a woman who has long been there, a love story shot through with sheer beauty, profound sadness, and deep truth. Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine. One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged nineteen, and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. In the mixed-doubles tournament he's partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who's forty-eight, confident, ironic, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is also a warm companion, their bond immediate. And they soon, inevitably, are lovers. Clinging to each other as though their lives depend on it, they then set up house in London to escape his parents and the abusive Mr. Mcleod. Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed her from a sterile marriage, and how--gradually, relentlessly--everything fell apart, as she succumbed to depression and worse while he struggled to understand the intricacy and depth of the human heart. It's a piercing account of helpless devotion, and of how memory can confound us and fail us and surprise us (sometimes all at once), of how, as Paul puts it, "first love fixes a life forever."

Julian Barnes (Author), Guy Mott (Narrator)

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