Flaubert’s Parrot

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.


Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction


Flaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.

A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.


© Julian Barnes 1984 (P) Penguin Audio 2010

Critics Review

  • Barnes manages to be erudite but extremely funny too… You never know what Barnes is going to do next and I admire that.’

    Daily Express
  • Delightful and enriching… A book to revel in!

    Joseph Heller
  • Endless food for thought, beautifully written… A tour de force

    Germaine Greer
  • A gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!

    John Irving
  • Julian Barnes’ wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks Flaubert made on a forgetting world. The writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny, and among the best prose I have read in years

    Sunday Times

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