Departure[s] by Julian Barnes (2026): A Review
Author: Julian Barnes
Publication Year: 2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Pages: 165
Source: ebook
Genre: literary fiction, essay, memoir
First, please do not judge me for saying this is my first 2026 release. I will not be taking questions about why. Let’s just say it feels very ironic that my first 2026 book is Departure[s] and that by the time I read the last word, I was emotionally very far from where I started.
How did I choose it? Simple rule: if Julian Barnes writes, I read even if I arrive late. This round, Barnes beat out Winterson, Mary Costello, Douglas Stuart, Caro Claire Burke, and Ann Patchett. They will cope.
I picked up the book (well, tablet), saw "Julian Barnes," and, in my usual responsible fashion, did not bother to check the genre, topic, or anything resembling context. A few pages in, I started thinking: this doesn’t feel like a novel; this feels like an essay or a lecture on memory, illness, and Proust. Which, to be clear, I love. But then another feeling crept in: a distinct sense of farewell.
Curious (and slightly alarmed), I finally went back to see what exactly I was reading and found my answer. This is Barnes’s last novel, a deliberate farewell to his readers, written in the years he has been wrestling with illness, aging, loss, and love. So yes, starting my first 2026 book with someone else’s carefully constructed goodbye felt… ironic. It’s like sitting with a beloved friend, both of you quietly aware this might be the last long conversation you share. As Barnes suggests, he wanted to finish the book before death could interrupt him mid-sentence. I’m paraphrasing, but the intention is clear.
On death, illness, grief, and loss, I found myself oddly attracted. The book felt like a guide on how to approach these things with a certain clarity, even humor, before they fully arrive in your own life. This has been my private obsession for years, planning how to meet endings properly, despite the fact that I have not yet reached the middle of my life, at least statistically. But the signs are there: more funerals than weddings, more diagnoses, more reminders that you only truly understand some things when age finally taps you on the shoulder.
If life and work had cooperated, I would have finished Departure[s] in a single day. Instead, I had to read it in fragments, which came with its own strange anxiety: I kept feeling I needed to finish before something unexpected happened and left the book and everything else unfinished. Do I make sense? Probably not, but that was the feeling.
And yet, in the middle of all this sadness (which, to be fair, might be more mine than Barnes’s), he still made me laugh. Not just gentle smiles, but actual laugh-out-loud moments, followed by quieter smiles layered over a persistent sadness. I need a better word than “mastery,” but there is a particular Barnes-ness in the way he balances humor and melancholy without ever cheapening either.
Formally, I loved how he weaves essay, memoir, and fiction together as a way of saying goodbye. It feels surprisingly seamless in harmony, in balance, and, I would argue, very close to perfect. Consider this my slightly passive-aggressive compliment: I recently read another book that tried a similar collage of lecture and story, and let’s say I didn’t appreciate it.
Departure[s], on the other hand, feels like what it is: a final conversation with a writer who has spent a lifetime thinking about memory, love, time, and endings and has decided to leave us one last, carefully crafted way of looking at them.
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