History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize, 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 five works of non-fiction, including Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Légion d'honneur in 2017.

"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 think about what we think we know" -- Salman Rushdie Observer "There is more moral and intellectual fodder, and more jokes, here than you will read in a month of Sundays...storytelling and teaching which captivate, liberate, and above all, enchant" Financial Times "You will want to read it again and again, and why not? - there's nothing around to touch it" -- Anne Smith Literary Review "This is a novel like no other - provocative, superbly funny, a wonderful and most original work...gives the reader a sense of ebullient, whooping joy" Guardian "Barnes has created something unique in his work: a particular way of looking at life, at words, at relationships" Financial Times