Elizabeth Finch Julian Barnes

Jonathan Cape £16.99 This slender tale of big ideas muses on topics from monogamy to national hypocrisy. Its narrator, Neil, is a resting actor whose life is changed by taking an evening course. The teacher is charismatic (some may beg to differ) Elizabeth Finch, with whom he strikes up a distant friendship. After her death, Neil inherits her papers and pieces together an essay from her notes on Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Barnes’s 14th novel isn’t his most accessible, but then, as ‘E.F.’ might say, accessibility shouldn’t always be literature’s chief concern.

Hephzibah Anderson