In his most recent novel, Love, etc., Mr. Barnes revisits the lives of Stuart, Gillian and Oliver, the affecting and memorable characters of Talking It Over. Mr. Barnes read from Love, etc. at a Harvard Book store event last March. You can listen to reading via real audio here . Julian Barnes is the also the author of Flaubert's Parrot and Metroland.

Mr. Barnes recommends these books for these summer days:

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
by Ford Madox Ford

The Good Soldier relates the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness by the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian facade. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, the novel has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene.
pb, $10.95

The Custom of the Country
by Edith Wharton

A woman of extraordinary ambition and exuberant vitality, Undine is consigned by virtue of her sex to the shadow-world of the drawing room and boudoir.
pb, $12.00

A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man
by Gustave Flaubert

Frederic Moreau, a moderately gifted young provincial, is ambitious in many ways: he dreams of fame, of vast wealth, of literary and artistic achievement, of a grand passion. On the Paris paddle-steamer which transports him to his home town of Nogent-sur-Seine at the outset of the novel, he becomes transfixed by the demure Madame Arnoux and, back in Paris, cultivates her ebullient and enterprising husband in order to be near her. Frederic's devotion fluctuates like his other enthusiasms, and he is caught up in the intense pleasures and the inevitable ennuis of Parisian life.
pb, $4.95

The Last September
by Elizabeth Bowen

The Last September is the story of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history. Bowen evokes the end of an era--British rule in Ireland--and the demise of a class and a way of life.
pb, $12.00

The First Man
by Albert Camus

The final, posthumous masterpiece from Nobel Laureate Albert Camus tells an unmistakably autobiographical story of a boy growing up in Algeria, fatherless, in poverty, amid silent, illiterate women. 'Radiant . . . one of the most extraordinary evocations of childhood that exists in any language'. - The Boston Globe.
pb, $12.00