On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, one of our great novelists delivers a playful and profound work about memory, love, and the writer's endgame. 'A culmination . . . shimmering with Barnes's] silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the mysterious ways of the human heart.' --The Atlantic Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: 'There will be a story--or a story within the story--but not just yet.' Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes's reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief, and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we're prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met