A great novel, Barnes's masterpiece... Exquisite, intimate detail. He has given us a novel that is powerfully affecting, a condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man's conscience, one man's art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism.
Alex Preston
Observer
Barnes's sombre, brilliant new novel opens with a scene like something from ... Read morea story by Chekhov... Gleaming with intelligence and literary flair, this elegantly composed fictional meditation offers a fresh gloss on a musical genius's collisions and collusions with power.
Peter Kemp
Sunday Times
[Barnes is] a master of the narrative sidestep... Not just a novel about music, but something more like a musical novel... The story itself is structured in three parts that come together like a broken chord. It is a simple but brilliant device, and one that goes right to the heart of this novel.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
The Times
A compelling novel about art and power, courage and cowardice, and the capriciousness of fate...Barnes brilliantly captures the composer's conflicted state of mind...This book is only 190 pages long, but it packs an extraordinary emotional punch.
Sebastian Shakespeare
Tatler
The writing in the early pages is magnificent... The reader has the confidence of being in the hands of a master storyteller... Barnes has a good sense of what life was like in the Soviet Union. He captures well the black humor, irony and cynicism.
Orlando Figes
New York Review of Books
Julian Barnes' novel deftly evokes the complexity of Shostakovich's relationship with Stalin and the power of his oeuvre... Thick with period detail... The book returns us to the music itself, that immense 20th-century oeuvre that contains everything but confirms nothing.
Hedley Twidle
Financial Times
Gripping... An intimately illuminating montage of Shostakovich's life... Immediately engaging.
James Lasdun
Guardian
A novel of deceptive slenderness... You expect nothing less from a writer soaked in Flaubert.
Duncan White
Daily Telegraph
A series of elegant insights into the mind of a brilliant artist... Throughout, Barnes offers a surety of touch that few writers can match.
Independent on Sunday
[A] sad, self-lacerating and darkly funny hybrid of a novel. The Noise of Time is both a burrowing meditation on an artist's lifelong relationship with totalitarian power, fear and compromise, and a fascinating fictional biography of one of the 20th century's greatest composers... Barnes is a master.
Tod Wodicka
The National
A profound meditation on power and the relationship of art and power... It presents a life, and refrains from judgment. It is a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding... I don't think [Barnes] has written a finer, more truthful or more profound book.
Allan Massie
The Scotsman
The skilled novelist here brings alive not just the political turmoil that surrounded Shostakovich, but his love for his wives, his love for his children, a vivid counterpoint of artistic freedom and political oppression - the eloquent conjuring of one glass of vodka clinking against another.
The Economist
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