Understanding Julian Barnes surveys the career of one of England's most daring contemporary writers. A man of letters who has produced distinguished short fiction, journalism, and reportage, Barnes is best known as a strikingly innovative novelist.

In this analysis of Barnes's distinctive qualities and of his place in England's literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that the novelist's greatest achievement may well be his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way.

Evaluating the whole of Barnes's canon, Moseley describes the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, which is most notably apparent in his fourth novel, Flaubert's Parrot; identifies his technical and thematic concerns; and explores his divided career as a writer of serious novels, published under his own name, and of detective thrillers, published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.