This January, Booker Prize–winning British author Julian Barnes will turn 80—and he’s marking the occasion by releasing his final book. The new novel, Departure(s), a hybrid of autobiography and fiction, will be published by Knopf the day after Barnes’s birthday.
In 2020, the author was diagnosed with a rare but treatable form of blood cancer, and he has spent the past few years reflecting on his career and the things he still wants to write. “As you get older as a writer, you face the dilemma, what will be your last book?” Barnes says over Zoom from his London home. “And you don’t know because you assume you’re going to go on writing until the grim reaper cuts you down in your study.”
For a time, Barnes entertained writing a “last book” and putting it away in a drawer, while he continued to work on other projects—but he didn’t like the idea of having the book published posthumously. “Having my last book published in my lifetime is more fun,” he says. “I’ll be able to read my literary obituaries.”
But Barnes isn’t abandoning writing completely. “I’m not putting the cover on my typewriter,” he says. “I’m still going to write journalism and reviews. But in terms of writing complete books, this is it. You can always read the earlier ones.”
One of the most original writers of the last 50 years, Barnes is the author of 26 previous books that play with form and style and incorporate autobiography, criticism, history, philosophy, and fiction. His erudite and conversational works include Metroland, his 1980 debut; Flaubert’s Parrot; Nothing to Be Frightened Of; and The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize in 2011. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Légion d’honneur, among other honors. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages, according to Knopf.
Departure(s) centers on Julian, a widowed writer in his 70s, who relays the story of his two college friends, Stephen and Jean, who had a relationship in their 20s and then reunite in their 60s and get married. We follow Julian as he becomes the third wheel in their bumpy marriage—both their sounding board and reluctant confidante. Anxious Stephen loves sensible Jean (too zealously, perhaps) and puts up with her mean (and very funny) pet dog, while Jean feels increasingly smothered by Stephen. But both believe the relationship is their last chance at love, and so attempt to stick it out, compatibility be damned.
The book—a cross between a Nora Ephron comedy and a Machado De Assis novel, with nods to Marcel Proust—playfully engages the reader as it explores love and death, memory and identity, and the curious perils of second chance romance. Along the way, Barnes discusses, through Julian, living with blood cancer, which the author manages with medication and bloodletting treatments; facing mortality; and forging connections with readers.
“Gradually, as I wrote the book, I thought, this is the last one,” Barnes says of Departure(s). “You’ve played your tunes, written the stuff you wanted to write.” Asked if he might change his mind in the future and write another book, he’s adamant: “I don’t feel I want to. I could probably write a bad or an insincere book, yes.”
Barnes’s books have reached every corner of the globe, from Japan to Iran to Brazil. Ryan Roberts, Barnes’s bibliographer and webmaster, works to document every printing of every edition of every book by Barnes, as well as books he has contributed writing to, and has meticulously cataloged and photographed more than 1,300 entries. “My friendship with Julian is one of the most important of my life,” says Roberts, who’s known Barnes since 1998. “When I read his books, I trust he’s going to point things out about this world that I hadn’t noticed before.”
Barnes grew up in the 1940s and ’50s in suburban London. He was a sensitive boy, the son of French teachers, who sometimes felt overshadowed by his older brother. “We were a sober English middle-class family,” Barnes recalls. “We didn’t do discord or argument.” After graduating from Oxford in 1968, where he studied modern languages, the author—who’s fluent in French and counts Gustave Flaubert among his influences—worked as a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary supplement and as a journalist and critic for publications including the New Statesman and the Observer. He wrote Metroland over several years in the ’70s.
“I was nervous,” Barnes says. “I didn’t have anyone to show it to.” Without an agent, he submitted it to U.K. publisher Jonathan Cape, and got it published after he agreed to do a few rounds of revisions. “There was no history of writing in my family. My mother had a letter published once in the Evening Standard newspaper.”
In 1978, Barnes met Pat Kavanagh at a party, and the pair married a year later. Kavanagh, a literary agent, represented Barnes until her death at 68 from a brain tumor, which Barnes discusses in his devastating 2013 book Levels of Life. “She was an ideal companion to a writer,” he says. “I dedicated all my books to her. I wanted her to be proud of me, and that made me write as well as I could.”
Sarah Ballard, Barnes’s agent since his wife’s death, appreciates the variety of Barnes’s work and his ability to connect with readers. “His contribution to literature is enormous,” she says. “He can absolutely hold you in the palm of his hand, whatever he writes.”
Barnes—who rose to prominence alongside Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie—has kept a journal for 50 years, which he sometimes consults for ideas. (“The first volume is full of frustrations and enviousness—and what the hell am I doing with my life?” he says.) He writes his books on an IBM 196c electric typewriter, and his former U.K. editor, Dan Franklin, who worked with Barnes for 27 years, says his work arrives perfectly typed, with corrections made in fountain pen. “His manuscripts are very beautiful,” Franklin notes.
At 79, the stylish author is a great wit and profound storyteller who’s still at the top of his game. He thinks about death every day, he admits, but that’s nothing new—he’s been doing it for decades. “You know, Michel de Montaigne said you should think about death every time a tile falls off a roof,” Barnes says, explaining that it’s a good way to get comfortable with one’s mortality.
Reflecting on his career, Barnes is glad he never compromised his vision. “I wrote my books, not versions of someone else’s books,” he says. He doesn’t have deep thoughts on turning 80. “I don’t like it, but it’s better than the alternative—being dead,” he offers with a smile. Releasing his last book the day after his birthday will make for a nice mic drop moment. “I’ll have a double celebration. If one goes wrong, the other one might go right.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
