[1] In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories, as well as two memoirs and a nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat, about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts.

[2] Barnes was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards.

[5] During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, about which he has said: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff.

The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work.

[3] His second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed with his second wife's past.

"[6] Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped establish Barnes as a serious literary figure when the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

[7] In 1986, Barnes published Staring at the Sun, a novel about a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality.

Barnes is a keen Francophile, and his 1996 book, Cross Channel, is a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France.

In 2003, Barnes undertook a rare acting role as the voice of Georges Simenon in a BBC Radio 4 series of adaptations of Inspector Maigret stories.

"[14][15] The Sense of an Ending also won the Europese Literatuurprijs and was on the New York Times Bestseller list for several weeks.

The second part is a short story about Fred Burnaby and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt, both also balloonists.

"[16] In The Guardian, Blake Morrison said of the third section: "Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief.

"[17] In 2013, Barnes took on the British government over its "mass closure of public libraries", Britain's "slip down the world league table for literacy" and its "ideological worship of the market – as quasi-religious as nature-worship – and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor".