JULIAN BARNES was born in Leicester and moved to London in 1946.
He is the author of twenty books, and in 2011 won the Man Booker
Prize for The Sense of an Ending. He met Pat Kavanagh in 1978.
Pat Kavanagh was born in South Africa and moved to London in 1964.
She worked in advertising and then, for forty years, as a literary
agent. She married Julian Barnes in 1979, and died in
2008.
An NPR Best Book of the Year
“Shattering. . . . Simultaneously wise, funny and devastating. . .
. A fascinating discourse on love and sorrow.” —The New York Times
Book Review
“Elegant. . . . Deeply stirring. . . . Barnes’s account of his
grief [has] a fierce and fiery kind of momentum. Within a few pages
it is aloft.” —The Boston Globe
“Levels of Life would seem to pull off the impossible: to recreate,
on the page, what it is like to be alive in the world.” —The
Guardian (London)
“Wonderful. . . . Not a grief memoir so much as a grief meditation.
. . . Short, crisp, measured, and deeply felt.” —The New York
Review of Books
“A rumination on grief and the alchemical power of love.” —O, the
Oprah Magazine
“This is the most inventive and honest portrayal of grief we’ve
read. . . . Barnes approaches memoir, a genre that too often errs
on the side of sentimental, with complete grace.” —The Huffington
Post
“Powerful. . . . ‘Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul,’ Barnes
quotes Samuel Johnson. Levels of Life boldly and beautifully buffs
the corrosion.” —NPR
“Artistically exquisite. . . . A penetrating, absorbing and deeply
moving study of love, heartbreak and the process of mourning.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A powerful dirge and slender but shapely work of art.” —The Daily
Beast
“Evocative and moving. . . . Levels of Life is a magically sad
work, a record of loss that is also a record of life, whose shared
stories heighten one another.” —The Brooklyn Rail
“Stunning. . . . Deceptively compact but takes us deep. . . . Still
grieving, still longing himself, Barnes, like Nadar from above in
his hot air balloon, has given us a perspective never seen before.”
—The Miami Herald
“A tour-de-force masterwork.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Spare and beautiful. . . . A book of rare intimacy and honesty
about love and grief. To read it is a privilege. To have written it
is astonishing.” —The Times (London)
“Eloquent. . . . A precisely composed, often deeply moving hybrid
of non-fiction, ‘fabulation,’ and straightforward reminiscence and
contemplation, is a gifted writer’s response to the
incomprehensible.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Profound. . . . Harrowing. . . . Anyone who has loved and lost
can’t fail to be moved by this devastating book.” —The Independent
(London)
“Arresting. . . . Barnes writes with astonishing precision about
mourning and grief, those areas of human experience so often
camouflaged with evasion and silence.” —The Daily Telegraph
(London)
“High art, essential reading. It is as powerful and
well-articulated as Joan Didion’s harrowing and classic discussion
of losing her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking. Barnes manages
to be moving precisely because he leaves so much unsaid. His
silences are eloquent.” —Daily Mail
“Moving, heartfelt, exact and telling. . . . A remarkable narrative
that is as raw in its emotion as it is characteristically elegant
in its execution.” —The Irish Times
“At times unbearably sad, but it is also exquisite: a paean of
love, and on love, and a book unexpectedly full of life. . . . In
time [this] may come to be viewed as the hardest test and finest
vindication of [Barnes’s] literary powers.” —The Herald (Scotland)
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