10 Duffy (1980)

Duffy is the first in a series of crime novels about a bisexual private eye that Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. It came out the same year as Barnes’s debut novel proper, Metroland, but where that took seven years to write, this took 10 days. Not that it shows: this “refreshingly nasty” (as Barnes’s friend Martin Amis put it) crime caper is beguilingly well written, with passages that display all of Barnes’s perception and wit. The plot of reverse blackmail and the shocking climax only add to the fun. Sample line “Two in the morning is when sounds travel for ever, when a sticky window makes a soft squeak and three Panda cars hear it from miles away.”

9 The Porcupine (1992)

Barnes’s shortest novel is a satire of the personalities in a collapsed European communist regime. Former leader Petkanov is to have a televised trial. He believes he did nothing wrong – “They loved me” – and despises Gorbachev’s western-friendliness, “sucking Reagan’s dick and then sucking Bush’s”. His crimes (“He corrupted everything he touched … He lied all the time, as a reflex”) sound ever familiar. This funny, savage novel reminds us that when the old order passes, it doesn’t die; it just waits. Sample line** **“If you beat someone with a stick and order them to say they love you, sooner or later they will tell you what you want to hear.”

8 The Lemon Table (2004)

The second of Barnes’s three story collections is infused with ageing, but full of energy. There’s a musical comedy spirit to A Short History of Hairdressing, in which a man measures his life in haircuts, from youth through marriage (“the only adventure open to the cowardly,” he says, quoting Voltaire) to the “mattressy eyebrow hairs” of old age. Hygiene explores the death of sex, while The Silence focuses on Jean Sibelius, with Barnes wearing his knowledge lightly. In Knowing French he ranks one of his own books, telling an imaginary reader not to bother with his second novel, Before She Met Me (1982). We’re saying nothing. Sample line “When the heart breaks, he thought, it splits like timber, down the full length of the plank.”

7 The Sense of an Ending (2011**)**

Twenty-four years after he coined the term “posh bingo” to describe the Booker prize, Barnes finally won, on his fourth shortlisting. He is in his comfort zone here – middle-class England, memory, sex – but the proximity of death sharpens things. When narrator Tony feels the end is approaching, he looks the other way: to youth, the time before bumptious confidence gave way to the agnosticism of middle age. His quiet life is suddenly overturned by remorse about an ex-girlfriend. And once the mind starts turning, it’s hard to stop. Sample line “Remorse, etymologically, is the act of biting again. That’s what the feeling does to you.”

6 Staring at the Sun (1986**)**

This extravagantly imaginative novel looks back too: but from the future of – ready to feel old? – the year 2020. Barnes predicts online books and a form of AI, but the heart of the story is Jean Serjeant, approaching her 100th birthday and wondering “How do you tell a good life from a bad life, a wasted life?” Her reluctance with sex (“it was like someone being sick all over you”) and her childhood are among the aspects worked through with Barnes’s usual blend of fun and essayistic insight. Sample line “When she thought of Michael and sex she imagined an over-filling water-tank which occasionally had to be drained.”

5 Arthur & George (2005)

Barnes, who was always doing something different, did something different again with this fat historical novel inspired by a real miscarriage of justice, and featuring Arthur Conan Doyle. The story switches between Conan Doyle’s viewpoint and that of the wronged man, George Edalji. It raises questions of truth, Englishness and fame. As arguably Barnes’s most straightforward novel, Arthur & George was rightly predicted by his publishers to win him “an entirely new audience”. “I sort of feel awkward about that,” Barnes said, “because I liked my old audience.” Sample line “He is quite clear about the writer’s responsibilities: they are, firstly, to be intelligible, secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever.”

4 Talking It Over (1991)

Barnes’s ability to bring a fresh eye to the oldest subjects is seen here, as a love triangle is narrated by the participants in turn, each appealing to the reader: “The three of us are in here until it’s resolved. You’re in here too.” Staid Stuart, flashy Oliver and pragmatic Gillian battle it out, where accounts of the same events differ and there is no objective truth. A sequel, Love, Etc, followed in 2000. Barnes did consider making it a trilogy, but – alas for fans – has now announced that his new book, Departure(s), will be his last. Sample line “Of course, you know if they’re really fucking, don’t you? Go on, tell me.”

3 The Noise of Time (2016)

This novel – Barnes’s best of the 21st century – is a spiritual cousin to The Porcupine, but more grounded and personal. In 1930s Russia, Dmitri Shostakovich has fallen foul of the Soviet authorities: his music is too elitist, insufficiently “authentic, popular and melodious”. But for Shostakovich, music is art, and “art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time”. With analytical delicacy and his own popular touch, Barnes untangles the questions of how we submit to power and whether we can look ourselves in the mirror afterwards. Sample line** **“To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment […] but to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime.”

2 A History of the World in 10****1/2 Chapters (1989)

If the storyteller and the experimenter have always been competing impulses in Barnes, here is where they work most beautifully together. It’s a novel in stories, running from biblical times to a futuristic heaven, loosely linked by Noah’s Ark. This is an exceptionally wide-ranging, ambitious book, taking in animals on trial, art criticism and jungle exploration, all in multiple narrative forms. And throughout, it’s as diverting as it is stimulating. Sample line “When I say ‘I’ you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented.”

1 Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)

“I wish he’d shut up about Flaubert,” said Kingsley Amis of Barnes – but the arch-Francophile was just getting started with this breakthrough book. Following two traditional novels, this felt like a great release: Barnes finally doing what he really wanted to. It tells stories, it plays around, it ducks and feints around the narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite and his, well, Barnesian interest in Flaubert. Incorporating biographers’ professional rivalry, a widower’s grief, opposing chronologies of Flaubert’s life and even an exam paper near the end, this is delicious, nutritious entertainment. Sample line “Whatever else happens, we shall remain stupid.” (Said by Gustave Flaubert, of course.)