Departure(s) by Julian Barnes: Love, sex and a real sense of an ending

Julian Barnes will be 80 on January 19, an anniversary he is celebrating with the publication of this book, which he says will definitely be his last, although he’ll continue journalism, plus a sold-out conversation with his old mucker Ian McEwan at the Union Chapel next week.

As he explains here, he was diagnosed during lockdown with a form of blood cancer that isn’t curable but is manageable. He absorbs the news in his usual vein of chatty, homespun philosophising. “‘Incurable yet manageable’, that sounds like… life, doesn’t it?” he says, his prose always thus matily nudging the reader.