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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Departure(s)

Departure(s)

Barnes, Julian

Paperback

Series: Vintage International

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date December 1, 2026

ISBN13: 9798217008698
Publisher: Vintage
Published: Dec 1 2026
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.19 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A momentous publication culminating a long career, one of our great novelists delivers a playful and profound work about memory, love, and the writer's endgame.

A culmination . . . shimmering with [Barnes's] silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the mysterious ways of the human heart. --The Atlantic

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 Barnes's 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 played matchmaker to Stephen (tall, gangling, uncertain) and Jean (tart and attractive); as the third wheel he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and forty years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals and disappointments of a different order.

Life and memory can be so . . . quixotic, don't you find? Barnes uses both his novelistic memory and his (real?) personal diary entries to examine not just the quixotic relationship of Jean and Stephen but his writer's eye on it, and how his efforts on their behalf add up in the end. Having promised them he'd never write about them, he breaks the promise to fulfill one, amply, to his readers, in this delightful and poignant novelist's game that only Julian Barnes can play so well.

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