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  • Published: 1 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099540588
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.00

Flaubert's Parrot




'An intricate and delightful novel' (Graham Greene) from Booker prize-winning author Julian Barnes.

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the great French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer's work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself.

  • Published: 1 October 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099540588
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $24.00

About the author

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and The Man in the Red Coat, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Duff Cooper Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.

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Praise for Flaubert's Parrot

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

Caroline Rees, Daily Express

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

Joseph Heller

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

Germaine Greer

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

John Irving

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

Sunday Times

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

John Fowles