<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>An essay on grief and love for the author's late wife Pat, in which he discusses ballooning, photography, love, and bereavement; putting two things and two people together; and then tearing those things apart.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><b>An NPR Best Book of the Year<br></b><br>In this elegant triptych of history, fiction, and memoir, Julian Barnes has written about ballooning and photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and tearing them apart; and enduring after the incomprehensible loss of a loved one. Powerfully rendered, exquisitely crafted in Barnes's erudite style, this searing work confirms the author as an unparalleled magus of the heart.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>"Shattering. . . . Simultaneously wise, funny and devastating. . . . A fascinating discourse on love and sorrow." --<i>The New York Times Book Review</i> <p/>"Elegant. . . . Deeply stirring. . . . Barnes's account of his grief [has] a fierce and fiery kind of momentum. Within a few pages it is aloft." --<i>The Boston Globe</i> <p/>"<i>Levels of Life</i> would seem to pull off the impossible: to recreate, on the page, what it is like to be alive in the world." --<i>The Guardian</i> (London) <p/> "Wonderful. . . . Not a grief memoir so much as a grief meditation. . . . Short, crisp, measured, and deeply felt." --<i>The New York Review of Books<br></i><br> "A rumination on grief and the alchemical power of love." --<i>O, the Oprah Magazine</i> <p/>"This is the most inventive and honest portrayal of grief we've read. . . . Barnes approaches memoir, a genre that too often errs on the side of sentimental, with complete grace." --<i>The Huffington Post <br></i><br> "Powerful. . . . 'Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, ' Barnes quotes Samuel Johnson. <i>Levels</i> <i>of Life</i> boldly and beautifully buffs the corrosion." --NPR <p/> "Artistically exquisite. . . . A penetrating, absorbing and deeply moving study of love, heartbreak and the process of mourning." --<i>Minneapolis Star Tribune<br></i><br> "A powerful dirge and slender but shapely work of art." --<i>The Daily Beast<br></i><br> "Evocative and moving. . . . <i>Levels of Life</i> is a magically sad work, a record of loss that is also a record of life, whose shared stories heighten one another." --<i>The Brooklyn Rail<br></i><br> "Stunning. . . . Deceptively compact but takes us deep. . . . Still grieving, still longing himself, Barnes, like Nadar from above in his hot air balloon, has given us a perspective never seen before." --<i>The Miami Herald<br></i><br> "A tour-de-force masterwork." --<i>Richmond Times-Dispatch<br></i><br> "Spare and beautiful. . . . A book of rare intimacy and honesty about love and grief. To read it is a privilege. To have written it is astonishing." --<i>The Times</i> (London) <p/> "Eloquent. . . . A precisely composed, often deeply moving hybrid of non-fiction, 'fabulation, ' and straightforward reminiscence and contemplation, is a gifted writer's response to the incomprehensible." --<i>The Times Literary Supplement</i> (London) <p/> "Profound. . . . Harrowing. . . . Anyone who has loved and lost can't fail to be moved by this devastating book." --<i>The Independent</i> (London) <p/> "Arresting. . . . Barnes writes with astonishing precision about mourning and grief, those areas of human experience so often camouflaged with evasion and silence." --<i>The Daily Telegraph</i> (London) <p/> "High art, essential reading. It is as powerful and well-articulated as Joan Didion's harrowing and classic discussion of losing her husband, <i>The Year of Magical Thinking</i>. Barnes manages to be moving precisely because he leaves so much unsaid. His silences are eloquent." --<i>Daily Mail<br></i><br> "Moving, heartfelt, exact and telling. . . . A remarkable narrative that is as raw in its emotion as it is characteristically elegant in its execution." --<i>The Irish Times<br></i><br> "At times unbearably sad, but it is also exquisite: a paean of love, and on love, and a book unexpectedly full of life. . . . In time [this] may come to be viewed as the hardest test and finest vindication of [Barnes's] literary powers." --<i>The Herald</i> (Scotland)<br></p><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><p>Julian Barnes was born in Leicester and moved to London in 1946. He is the author of twenty books, and in 2011 won the Man Booker Prize for <i>The Sense of an Ending</i>. He met Pat Kavanagh in 1978. <p/>Pat Kavanagh was born in South Africa and moved to London in 1964. She worked in advertising and then, for forty years, as a literary agent. She married Julian Barnes in 1979, and died in 2008. </p>
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