`Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read. Barnes is like a worldly, secular reincarnation of a medieval gloss-writer on sacred texts, and what he offers us is the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we know we think about what we think we know' Salman Rushdie, Observer
От издателя Перед вами "любовный треугольник" скромного банковского служащего, талантливого неудачника и средней руки художницы-реставратора...
As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. In Julian Barnes's new novel, the grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. He constructs on the island 'The Project', a vast heritage centre containing everything 'English', from Buck House to Stonehenge, from Manchester United to the White Cliffs of Dover. The project is monstrous, risky and vastly successful. Indeed it gradually begins to rival 'Old' England and threatens to supersede it. 'Both ambitious and serious -- real if you like. Dive at those dump-bins.' Andrew Marr, Observer 'A brilliant, Swiftian fantasy.' Economist 'There is no more intelligent writer on the literary scene. In this novel he is also moving. He has written nothing more poignant and enticing.' John Carey, Sunday Times 'The novel has memorable characters and sentences, but its main impact will be through its penetrating ideas.' John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph