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Staring at the Sun

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Staring at the Sun

By: Julian Barnes
Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011

Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides.

© Julian Barnes 1986 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 20th Century Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Small Town & Rural Women's Fiction

Critic Reviews

None of Mr Barnes's previous work... has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity of Staring at the Sun...it dazzles in depth
Brilliant... Mr Barnes's work is at the forefront of a new internationalization of British fiction
A remarkable and risk-taking book, breezily philosophical and light-fingered, funny and also genuinely affecting in that it touches both the heart and the head
All stars
Most relevant
Poor Jean! What a tough life and such a terrible experience of sex! Was it really like that in the 1940s - sad to think of all those people missing out! Suicide to avoid old age? I have thought about it often particularly now I am in my late 60s and clearly going down hill! The author who was relatively young in 1984 might have a different view now! Everything should be on the table but I would not gamble on there being a god and/or an afterlife. We are all going to rot!

Excellent narration - I give it 5!

A good one for the oldies!

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