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Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10 Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin... This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.
"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 think about what we think we know" -- Salman Rushdie Observer "There is more moral and intellectual fodder, and more jokes, here than you will read in a month of Sundays...storytelling and teaching which captivate, liberate, and above all, enchant" Financial Times "You will want to read it again and again, and why not? - there's nothing around to touch it" -- Anne Smith Literary Review "This is a novel like no other - provocative, superbly funny, a wonderful and most original work...gives the reader a sense of ebullient, whooping joy" Guardian "Barnes has created something unique in his work: a particular way of looking at life, at words, at relationships" Financial Times
ISBN: 9780099540120
ISBN-10: 0099540126
Audience:
General
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 320
Published: 6th August 2009
Dimensions (cm): 19.6 x 12.9
x 2.1
Weight (kg): 0.253
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