Flaubert's Parrot

By: Julian Barnes

Narrated by: Julian Barnes

Brought to you by Penguin.


Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Flaubert's Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.

A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.


© Julian Barnes 1984 (P) Penguin Audio 2010

Critic reviews

Barnes manages to be erudite but extremely funny too… You never know what Barnes is going to do next and I admire that.’

Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in

A gem: an unashamed literary novel that is also unashamed to be readable, and broadly entertaining. Bravo!

Endless food for thought, beautifully written... A tour de force

Unputdownable... A mesmeric original

A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny

A dazzling entertainer

Delightful and enriching... A book to revel in!

Julian Barnes' wry and graceful book, part novel, part stealthy literary criticism, traces the marks Flaubert made on a forgetting world. The writing is unfailingly sharp and often very funny, and among the best prose I have read in years

A delight... Handsomely the best novel published in England in 1984