I was casually checking the library shelves, when Departure(s) by Julian Barnes caught my eye. The cover did the rest. Printed right there on the front, the book describes itself as “a work of fiction—but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” I read that twice, then carried it straight to the checkout counter. How was I supposed to walk away from a line like that?

The book makes good on its promise. What you get is a story that could be fiction, could be a memoir, and lands somewhere in the slippery space between, through and through. It has a clear beginning and a clear ending. The middle, though? That’s missing on purpose. Barnes builds the whole thing as a deliberately incomplete story, stitched together from three sets of overlapping memories: his own (or rather those of a character named Julian Barnes, standing in for the author), plus the recollections of a man and a woman whose relationship he traces. The three of them met at university back in the 1960s. Then comes the gap: a wide gaping hole in the timeline where none of them had any contact with the other two.

The point of view is where the story really opens up. These are people looking back from the far end of their lives, putting words to what they lived through and how they felt about it. Barnes hands each of them the page and lets them speak. The writing is elegant and graceful, and it still hits you square in the chest. By the end, you come away believing two things at once: every story has a start and a finish, and memory will happily fool you in everything that falls between.

If you enjoy fiction that makes you question how reliable any of our own stories really are, Departure(s) is well worth pulling off the shelf. Just don’t expect it to hand you the whole picture. That’s rather the point.

My Favorite Bits

• You think you have remembered something ‘just so,’ and the more times you have remembered it and retold it, the more times you become convinced of its truth. But what if you were pulled up and corrected by.. your own brain?

• The rush towards certainty can lead one astray.

• I have found myself thinking a lot in recent years about how we remember the dead, about how quickly memory becomes myth and once-living people are turned into a set of anecdotes.

Author: Julian Barnes
Publication date: 17 January 2026
Number of pages: 176 pages