Sex, death and parrots: Julian Barnes’s best fiction

January 19, 2026

TL;DR

Duffy is a crime novel by Julian Barnes under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, featuring a bisexual private eye.
Another novel satirizes the personalities in a collapsed European communist regime, focusing on a former leader's televised trial.
A collection of short stories, A Short History of Hairdressing, deals with themes of aging and includes stories about death and Jean Sibelius.
Barnes won the Booker Prize for a novel set in middle-class England, exploring memory, sex, and the proximity of death.
An imaginative novel set in the future (2020) looks back at Jean Serjeant's life and her reflections on its quality.
Arthur & George is a historical novel inspired by a real miscarriage of justice, featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and exploring truth and Englishness.
A novel about a love triangle is narrated by the participants, where differing accounts of events highlight the absence of objective truth.
A 21st-century novel, a spiritual cousin to The Porcupine, deals with Dmitri Shostakovich's conflict with Soviet authorities over his music.
A novel structured as a collection of stories loosely linked by Noah's Ark, ranging from biblical times to a futuristic heaven.
Flaubert's Parrot is described as a breakthrough book where Barnes explores Flaubert's life and incorporates elements of biographical rivalry and grief.

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