Author: Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes’s 2026 novel, “Departure(s),” is a short book that manages a difficult task: It looks directly at mortality without flattening into gloom.
Part memoir, part fiction, it moves between Barnes’s own reflections and the story of Stephen and Jean, whose late-life reunion makes time feel newly real.
The premise can sound distant on paper — old age, illness, the disappearance of friends. In practice, it lands closer than you expect. Barnes writes about time the way it really behaves — quietly, and then all at once.
Reading it, I kept noticing how much of daily life depends on an assumption you rarely say out loud but which is guaranteed.
