A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Beginning with an unlikely stowaway's account of life on board Noah's Ark, A History of the World in 10- Chapters presents a surprising, subversive, fictional history of earth told from several kaleidoscopic perspectives. Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin...
This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen 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.