Clever, wise, reflective and imaginative, these stories are permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations of British people to cross the Channel and make a life in France.

From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes an enthralling set of short stories.

No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories spanning several centuries, he takes as his universal theme the British in France; from the last days of a reclusive English composer, the beef consuming 'navvies' labouring on the Paris-Rouen railway to a lonely woman mourning the death of her brother on the battlefields of the Somme.