Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011 - a brilliant short novel from a writer at the very height of his powers. Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove.

Wie sicher ist Erinnerung, wie unveränderlich die eigene Vergangenheit? Tony Webster muss lernen, dass Geschehnisse, die lange zurückliegen und von denen er glaubte, sie nie mehr hinterfragen zu müssen, plötzlich in einem ganz neuen Licht erscheinen.
Als Finn Adrian in die Klasse von Tony Webster kommt, schließen die beiden Jungen schnell Freundschaft. Auch später, nach der Schulzeit, bleiben die beiden in Kontakt. Bis die Freundschaft ein jähes Ende findet.
Vierzig Jahre später, Tony hat eine Ehe, eine gütliche Trennung und eine Berufskarriere hinter sich, ist er mit sich im Reinen. Doch der Brief eines Anwalts, verbunden mit einer Erbschaft, erwecken plötzlich Zweifel an den vermeintlich sicheren Tatsachen der eigenen Biographie. Je mehr Tony erfährt, desto unsicherer scheint das Erlebte und desto unabsehbarer die Konsequenzen für seine Zukunft.
Ein Text mit unglaublichen Wendungen, der den Leser auf eine atemlose Achterbahnfahrt der Spekulationen mitnimmt.

"In Barnes's (Flaubert's Parrot) latest, winner of the 2011 Man-Booker Prize, protagonist Tony Webster has lived an average life with an unremarkable career, a quiet divorce, and a calm middle age. Now in his mid-60s, his retirement is thrown into confusion when he's bequeathed a journal that belonged to his brilliant school-friend, Adrian, who committed suicide 40 years earlier at age 22. Though he thought he understood the events of his youth, he's forced to radically revise what he thought he knew about Adrian, his bitter parting with his mysterious first lover Veronica, and reflect on how he let life pass him by safely and predictably. Barnes's spare and luminous prose splendidly evokes the sense of a life whose meaning (or meaninglessness) is inevitably defined by "the sense of an ending" which only death provides. Despite its focus on the blindness of youth and the passage of time, Barnes's book is entirely unpretentious. From the haunting images of its first pages to the surprising and wrenching finale, the novel carries readers with sensitivity and wisdom through the agony of lost time." (Publisher's Weekly)

Julian Barnes is the author of ten previous novels, including Metroland, Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 Chapters and Arthur & George; three books of short stories, Cross Channel, The Lemon Table and Pulse; and also three collections of journalism, Letters from London, Something to Declare, and The Pedant in the Kitchen. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Medicis (for Flaubert's Parrot) and the Prix Femina (for Talking it Over). He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011. He lives in London.

Julian Barnes: Julian Barnes, 1946 geboren, arbeitete nach dem Studium der modernen Sprachen zunächst als Lexikograph und dann als Journalist. Seit 1980 hat Julian Barnes zahlreiche Romane geschrieben. Für sein Werk wurde er weltweit mit zahlreichen Literaturpreisen ausgezeichnet. 2004 und 2005 erhielt er den Österreichischen Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur. Julian Barnes lebt in London.