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Biographical note
Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and four works of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Légion d'honneur in 2017.Critics have overlooked his tenderness, underestimated his intelligence, and denied his wisdom... <i>The Porcupine</i> is a superbly accomplished novella
Nick Hornby
A minor masterpiece of political satire: compelling, funny and frightening
Robert Harris
<i>The Porcupine</i> is a new indisputable proof of Mr Barnes's creative power, yet what really astonished me, the Prosecutor, was the amazing precision of the intellectual's view of a socialist dictator, which so accorded with Zhivkov's true character
Prosecutor Zhekov, official prosecutor of the deposed Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov
The neatness of the novel's structure is complemented by the rampageous energy of the characters for which it is the cage
Daily Telegraph
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011
Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Party leader of a former Soviet satellite country, is on trial. His adversary, the prosecutor general, stands for the new government's ideals and liberal certainties, and is attempting to ensare Petkanov with the dictator's own totalitarian laws. But Petkanov is not beaten yet. He has been given his chance to fight back and he takes it with a vengeance, to the increasing discomfort and surprise of those around him.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011
Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Party leader of a former Soviet satellite country, is on trial. His adversary, the prosecutor general, stands for the new government's ideals and liberal certainties, and is attempting to ensare Petkanov with the dictator's own totalitarian laws.