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  • Published: 1 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099554998
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $26.99

The Lemon Table




'A moving portrayal of characters facing the end of their lives and looking back with regret, resignation or defiance' Independent

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011

From the hairdessing salon where an old man measures out his life in haircuts, to the concert hall where a music lover carries out an obsessive campaign against those who cough in concerts; from the woman who reads elaborate recipes to her sick husband as a substitute for sex, to the woman 'incarcerated' in an old people's home beginning a correspondence with an author that enriches both their lives - all Barnes' characters, in their different ways, square up to death and rage against the dying light.

  • Published: 1 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099554998
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $26.99

About the author

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 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 three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and The Man in the Red Coat, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Duff Cooper Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.

Also by Julian Barnes

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Praise for 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