Talking It Over

First there’s Stuart, stolid, conventional, but not quite so dull as he pretends to be. Then there is Oliver, his glamorous, epigrammatic best friend. And veering wildly between them is Gillian, the cryp- tic beauty who marries Stuart and then astonishes everyone by falling in love with Oliver. These three are at once the pro- tagonists and the hilariously unreliable eye-witnesses of this funny, elegant, and affecting novel by bestselling author Julian Barnes, which reimagines the ro- mantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.