Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes’s wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes—winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending—follows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalog of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and a glimpse of technology in the twenty-first century (when The Absolute Truth can be universally accessed).
 
Elegant, funny and intellectually subversive, Staring at the Sun is Julian Barnes at his most dazzlingly original.
 
“Brilliant. . . . A marvelous literary epiphany.”
—Carlos Fuentes, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Barnes’s literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled.”
—New Republic