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.