Staring at the Sun

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barness wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barneswinner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Endingfollows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed). Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original