Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in
A gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!
Endless food for thought, beautifully written... A tour de force
Unputdownable... A mesmeric original
A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny
Sunday Times
A dazzling entertainer
New Yorker
Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in!
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
A delight... Handsomely the best novel published in England in 1984
John Fowles
A dazzling achievement...remarkably inventive as well as audacious
Walter Abish
Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert.
As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself.
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.
‘Unputdownable... A mesmeric original’ Philip Larkin
‘Delightful and enriching...a book to revel in!’ Joseph Heller
‘A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny’ Sunday Times
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR TO MARK THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PUBLICATION