The Sense of an Ending: Signed, Limited Edition from London Review Bookshop

The London Review Bookshop is offering a signed, limited first edition of The Sense of an Ending, published in association with Jonathan Cape, comprising 100 copies, 75 of which have been quarter-bound in Tusting Chestnut fine grain leather with Rainforest cloth sides, numbered 1 to 75, and 25 copies fully bound in the same leather, numbered i to xxv. All books have head and tail bands, brushed green tops and green Bugra Pastell endpapers, and are housed in suedel-lined slipcases.

Edition of 75: £150 (£170 after 4 August)
Edition of 25: £260 (£280 after 4 August)

For ordering information, please consult the promotional flyer.

Win a Signed Copy of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending

The Julian Barnes Website is working with Jonathan Cape to offer the chance to win a signed copy of the Cape edition of Julian Barnes's new novel The Sense of an Ending, published August 4th.

Please email the correct answer to the question below to contest@julianbarnes.com to be entered into a random drawing for one of the signed copies. We will forward a handful of randomly selected names supplying the correct answers to Jonathan Cape, and they will contact the winners for their postal address. Sound good? Please only enter once.

Here It Is: Julian Barnes's paperbacks are published by Vintage, and Vintage is about to turn 21. What Julian Barnes novel will be repackaged as part of the Vintage 21 promotion? (It will be published on August 4th in the UK, which is also the deadline for the giveaway).

Julian Barnes on Voltaire's Candide

Julian Barnes writes "A Candid View of Candide" for The Guardian (1 July 2011), in which he pays tribute to Voltaire's Candide. Barnes's essay introduces the new Folio Society edition of the book, available via the Folio Society Website.

From the Essay:

All this makes Voltaire's Candide even more of an extraordinary case. It was written between July and December 1758 and published simultaneously in Geneva, Paris and Amsterdam in January 1759. That year no fewer than three English translations appeared, shortly followed by the early version that is now most often read, by Tobias Smollett. This formed part of a 25-volume edition of Voltaire's works "translated from the French with Notes by Dr Smollett and others" and published between 1761 and 1765. Even the British acknowledged Voltaire as Europe's most famous public intellectual, and his Candide as a prime example of literature as news. This philosophical tale may be described as an attack on Leibnitzian optimism – and, more broadly, on all prepackaged systems of thought and belief – a satire on churches and churchmen, and a pessimistic rumination on human nature and the problem of free will. But it was no fable inhabiting some make-believe or symbolic location; rather, it was a report on the current state of the world, deliberately set among the headlines of the day.

The Sense of an Ending (Extract)

The Telegraph has published an extract from Julian Barnes's soon to be published novel The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense of an Ending, the disturbing new novel from Julian Barnes, is narrated by a man looking back on a lifetime of hope and remorse. In this exclusive extract, he grapples with his memories of a former friend -- a charismatic figure who enters his life as a prodigious schoolboy and departs it with an act of chilling calculation.

Read the extract at the Telegraph website.