Metroland

7 hrs. 3 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Julian Barnes

Narrator Irina Yerisanova

Description

Booker Prize laureate Julian Barnes is one of the brightest and most original prose writers of contemporary Britain. Perhaps his main talent is the ability to play, easily and naturally, with styles and directions in his own works.

Subtle stylization—cutting irony, refined lyricism, and sarcasm that reaches cynicism, aggressive hardness, and cheerful mischief—ALL of this and much more is within Barnes’s power.

“Metroland” is Barnes’s debut novel, “a masterpiece of nostalgic brashness” (Vogue) and at the same time “one of the best descriptions of family happiness in world literature” (Lev Danilkin). The novel received the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award and was adapted into a film (director Philip Saville; starring Christian Bale and Emily Watson). So, welcome to Metroland. Many have written about the “wild sixties” and their consequences, but no one has done it the way Barnes has—he’s the only one who didn’t cry, only laughed at the rise and fall of that wonderful era.

In Metroland, people once tried to change the world—and didn’t notice how the world changed them.