From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes a magnificent portrait of youth and growing up.

Christopher and Toni found in each other the perfect companion for that universal adolescent pastime: smirking at the world as you find it. In between training as flaneurs and the grind of school they cast a cynical eye over their various dislikes: parents with their lives of spotless emptiness, Third Division (North) football teams, God, commuters and girls, and the inhabitants of Metroland, the strip of suburban dormitory Christopher calls home.
Longing for real life to begin, we follow Christopher to Paris in time for les evenements of 1968, only to miss it all in a haze of sex, French theatre and first love, leading him, to Toni's disappointment, back to Metroland.

I was captivated from the first page. I cannot remember when I enjoyed a first novel more -- Nina Bawden * Daily Telegraph *
If all works of fiction were as thoughtful, as subtle, as well constructed, and as funny as Metroland there would be no more talk of the death of the novel * New Statesman *
A rare and unusual first novel -- William Boyd * London Magazine *
A very funny, touching first novel. It has a hard comic edge to it that is logical and at the same time extremely diverting * Spectator *
One would have to look very hard to find a wryer, more lovingly detailed account of intellectual and sexual innocence abroad -- Jay Parini * New York Times *
An alert, witty, unpredictable novel which brings a sharp fresh eye to bear on English character and English compromises * Observer *
Metroland is a delicious book, sharp and witty and observant * The Listener *
One of the best accounts of clever English schoolboyhood I've read * Times Educational Supplement *
Flighty, playful… Barnes succeeds in vividly recreating teenage precociousness, particularly what it feels like to be a young male encountering love and sex * Los Angeles Times *
A dazzling entertainer * New Yorker *

Julian Barnes is the author of fourteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize, 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 five works of non-fiction, including Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. He was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime contribution to literature in 2011, and the Légion d'honneur in 2017.