VANESSA GUIGNERY is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris, France.

Introduction

Chapter One. Metroland: everything that got away
1. Faltering starts
2. 'Petty Gripes' and 'Oua, oua, oua'
3. The Death Chapter
4. Return to Metroland
Chapter Two. The case for / The case against
1. Reviewing and being reviewed
2. The case of Before She Met Me
a. Julian Barnes's reButs to Hermione Lee's Buts
b. Finding the right title

Chapter Three. A chronology (of sorts)
Chapter Four. Flaubert's Parrot from ignition to composition
1. Flaubert Stories
2. The fictional narrator

Chapter Five. The Barnes apocrypha
1. A Literary Guide to Oxford: the itinerary of a book that was never published
2. The unwritten books which tantalize

Chapter Six. Staring at the Sun: a novel of forking roots and paths
1. Multiple roots and titles
2. Early starts
Chapter Seven. Fragments of stories: A History of the World in 10¿ Chapters
1. Planning, naming and arranging chapters
2. Not so simple stories
3. 'Parenthesis'
4. With a little help from my friends
Chapter Eight. The Porcupine in the making: writer and translator
1. An outsider's view
2. Is and is not
3. The ending of the novel
4. The libel risks
Chapter Nine. A dictionary of Julian Barnes
Chapter Ten. Arthur & George: beginnings and endings
1. First and final steps
2. The blind spots of research
3. The art of beginning
4. Finding a JB title
5. Working out tenses

Chapter Eleven. Nothing to Be Frightened Of as an echo chamber
1. The obsession with death: from the early notebooks to Nothing to Be
Frightened Of
2. This is not an autobiography
3. Fictionalising memory in The Only Story
Chapter Twelve. The Sense of an Ending: time in reverse
1. Prequels in real life
2. A sequel to Metroland?
3. Getting started: the title and the incipit
4. A denser text
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index