Departure(s)

The final book from the Booker Prize-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author

Departure(s) is a work of fiction - but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Julian Barnes’s Departure(s) arrives as a deliberately slippery, genre bending finale to his 45 year career, blending memoir, fiction, philosophy and autofiction into something that is “not quite a novel,” as several critics have noted. The book opens with meditations on involuntary memory and the quixotic nature of recollection, echoing Proust while also reflecting Barnes’s diagnosis with a rare but manageable blood cancer. These reflections on ageing, illness, and the construction of self form the book’s philosophical backbone, with reviewers emphasising its hybrid nature and its refusal to sit neatly within traditional categories. 

Interleaved with these personal essays is a resurrected love story: Stephen and Jean, two former Oxford students whom Barnes once introduced and whose relationship he privately championed. Their youthful romance fizzled after 18 months, only to be rekindled four decades later — a reunion Barnes facilitates and then narratively interrogates. Critics highlight how Barnes knowingly breaks his promise not to write about them, turning the tensions, betrayals and disappointments of their second attempt at love into a metafictional exercise in authorial responsibility. The book’s shifting ground — what is real, what is embellished, what is memory performing its tricks — is one of its deliberate pleasures. 

As a final act, Departure(s) becomes a valediction: Barnes contemplating mortality with mordant humour, hard won acceptance, and a gentle refusal to offer grand last words. Critics describe it as unexpectedly funny in places — including moments involving an elderly Jack Russell — but also deeply moving, a work suffused with the calm of someone who has made peace with life’s narrowing horizons. If this really is Barnes’s last book, many reviewers argue he exits with grace: a slim but resonant meditation on memory, love, death, and the stories we cannot help but tell, even when we promise not to.