A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Hardcover

Barnes, Julian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224026690 ISBN 13: 9780224026697

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London, 1989

Synopsis

A fictional history of the world in which stories echo each other as themes deepen and images recur. The author also wrote "Metroland" for which he won the 1981 Somerset Maughan Award and "Flaubert's Parrot" which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

About this title

Review:

Fact, fiction, myth, opinion - Barnes's series of disjointed narratives about Noah's Ark, terrorist hijackers, shipwreck, woodworm, love and more is all of these. It leaves you torn between thinking that its sum is greater than its parts and that, then again, some of the parts are pretty damned good too, especially the half-chapter titled "Parenthesis". Somehow this pithy new Alex Jennings recording perfectly succeeds in combining the various "history is bunk" and "love conquers all" strands. --Sue Arnold, The Guardian

Book Description:

‘Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read. Barnes is like a worldly, secular reincarnation of a medieval gloss-writer on sacred texts, and what he offers us is the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we know we think about what we think we know’ Salman Rushdie, Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0224026690
• ISBN 13: 9780224026697
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309