Sarah A Smith

Love, Marriage and Ethnic Ovens

Pulse

By

Jonathan Cape 228 pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Julian Barnes’s writing, with its carefully calibrated shifts of tone, gently mocking humour and focus on affairs of the heart, is perfectly suited to the short-story format. Although his third collection, Pulse, is less thematically structured than his previous work, there is a fluidity and playfulness to this varied body of stories which, if not always successful, is often very pleasing.

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