Departure(s)
by Julian Barnes,
Jonathan Cape 2026

Reviewed by Sandra Renew

Julian Barnes’s latest book adds to his list of more than 20 well-regarded novels and non-fiction, including The Sense of an Ending which won the 2011 Booker Prize. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime contribution to literature in 2011 and the Légion d’honneur in 2017.

In Departure(s) Barnes employs an interesting narrative structure. There is detail of the changing relationships of the two protagonists, Stephen and Jean, as they leave university and navigate ordinary and unremarkable life paths. He uses, as story, his own relations with the two protagonists, the uncertainties and lack of clarity around his understanding of his own status in these relationships. And he intersperses reflections and understandings about the nature of and questions arising from his own position in the final decades of an aging life. There is also a dog named Jimmy.

While the plot line is widely meandering and thoughtful, Barnes never loses control of the onward pull of his fascination with the failing body. It’s about achieving happiness and the difficulties of recognising being happy, about the slippage between experiences and their forming into memory.
Barnes has been described as ‘a master of fiction with whole worlds living in his prose’ and as ‘clever, often original and unusually funny’.

This is a book well worth the reading time, a book that engages and questions, and leaves points of view open for book club discussion.