Julian Barnes is appearing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (a week-long extravaganza of ideas and literature). He is an author of several books of stories, essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet’sIn the Land of Pain, and numerous novels, including the newly published The Noise of Time

The Noise of Time is a novel about the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his life under the Stalinist regime.