Nothing to be Frightened Of

Both fun and funny. It is sharp too, in the sense of painful as well as witty... Barnes dissects with tremendous verve and insight this awesome inevitability of death and its impact on the human psyche. He also tears at your heart - New Statesman

A maverick form of family memoir that is mainly an extended reflection on the fear of death and on that great consolation, religioous belief... It is entertaining, intriguing, absorbing...an inventive and invigorating slant on what is nowadays called 'life writing'. It took me hours to write this review because each reference to my notes set me off rereading; that is a reviewer's ultimate accolade - Financial Times

A brilliant bible of elegant despair...that most urgent kind of self-help manual: the one you must read before you die - Vogue

Intensely fascinating - The Times

An elegant memoir and meditation. A deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter - Garrison Keillor

An essay in the best sense: speculative and precise, intimate and metaphysical, capacious and democratic in the variety of voices, alive and dead, that are invited to counsel the author as he edges his way towards the void - TLS

Intensely serious book of striking elegance: a clever, complicated reverie on last things, so full of ideas as to reveal itself quite slowly, through frequent re-reading - Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

A fantastic work of non-fiction, a showcase for his elegantly unfussy sentences and Barnes's ability to burrow to the very bottom of a subject, no matter how daunting - The Sunday Herald

Julian Barnes takes on the ambitious subject of death - and succeeds brilliantly - Scotsman

It is a sincere, humble work, punctuated by moments of poignancy - The Irish Times

A rapt meditation on death, which mixes essay and memoir to elegant, frequently moving effect - Time Out

A thoughtful and elegantly written memoir, as one would expect from Julian Barnes - Independent on Sunday

Barnes dissects with tremendous verve and insight this awesome inevitability of death and its impact on the human psyche. He also tears at your heart eye. Although there is something invigorating about his scholarly meditation, overall the mood of the memento mori is of spirited stoicism tempering the dread - a reminder that, within this successful, sophisticated, erudite writer in his sixties, there still lives an anxious little boy - New Statesman

A superb new book... a disquisition on death that addresses religion, philosophy, literature, identity, memory, evolutionary biology and the nature of the universe. It is his funniest and frankest work yet - Daily Telegraph

The grim reaper slinks through every page of Julian Barnes's compelling memoir-cum-meditation...he is consistently interesting and entertaining - Daily Mail

It is witty, poignant and allusive, deals with the problems of memory and bristles with asides on poetry, penguins and religion...This preoccupation with death takes Barnes on a journey that meanders as delightfully as the topic is melancholy... What surprises me most about Nothing To Be Frightened Of is how funny it actually is... For all the wit, a vein of irony runs through the book...there is nothing glib or facetious about this book despite its overwhelming sense of the massive absurdity at the heart of being alive - Scotland on Sunday

This year, its moving, sly, terrified grappling with the approach of extinction overwhelmed me - Spectator, Books of the Year

A brilliant, discursive, very funny book about death and the fear of death, god, nature, nurture and the author's childhood. The closest thing to a memoir Barnes will ever write.

A Top Ten bestseller in hardback

Arthur & George was a huge bestseller, selling over 300,000 copies