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A compelling novel about art and power, courage and cowardice from the Booker-winning author of The Sense of An Ending

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´BARNES´S MASTERPIECE´ - OBSERVER

In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.´Stunning´ Sunday Times

´A profound meditation on power and the relationship of art and power... It is a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding... I don´t think Barnes has written a finer, more truthful or more profound book´ Scotsman

´A tour de force by a master novelist at the top of his game´ Daily Express

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"A great novel, Barnes´s masterpiece... Exquisite, intimate detail. He has given us a novel that is powerfully affecting, a condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man´s conscience, one man´s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism." Alex Preston Observer

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Julian Barnes is the author of twelve novels, including The Sense of an Ending , which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written three books of short stories, Cross Channel , The Lemon Table and Pulse ; four collections of essays; and two books of non-fiction, Nothing to be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times Number One bestseller Levels of Life . He lives in London.

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Julian Barnes is the author of twelve novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and two books of non-fiction, Nothing to be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d´honneur.

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