Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: "There will be a story --- or a story within the story --- but not just yet.” Of course, whether DEPARTURE(S) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Julian Barnes' reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief, and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we're prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom.

Julian Barnes’ novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class “Culture and Civilisation,” taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages. We are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding yet commanding woman. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil’s grasp, Elizabeth’s application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else does.

In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives, which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits.

One summer in the ’60s, 19-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he is partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who is married with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers. Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory --- and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another.

In 1936, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich fears for his livelihood and his life. Joseph Stalin has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, executed on the spot), Shostakovich reflects on his predicament. Though a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming yet another casualty of the Great Terror, for decades to come he will be held fast under the thumb of despotism: made to represent Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York City, forced into joining the Party, and compelled to weigh appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music.

This latest book from Julian Barnes, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning novel THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, begins in the 19th century and leads seamlessly into an entirely personal account of loss. LEVELS OF LIFE is about ballooning, photography, love and loss; about putting two things --- and two people --- together and tearing them apart.

Julian Barnes’s follow-up to THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, last year’s Man Booker winner, is this collection of 17 essays and one short story --- all of them previously printed over the past 15 years --- about writers and the art of writing. His ruminations on writers as diverse as Penelope Fitzgerald, Michel Houellebecq and Joyce Carol Oates are as incisive as one expects from the keen intellect that gave us FLAUBERT’S PARROT.