His first novel,
Metroland, published in 1980, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to
Paris, France, as a student, finally returning to London. The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work. After reading the novel, Barnes's mother complained about the book's "bombardment" of filth. ''Flaubert's Parrot'' was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped establish Barnes as a serious literary figure when the novel was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize. In 1986, Barnes published
Staring at the Sun, a novel about a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality. In 1989, Barnes published
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a nonlinear novel that uses a variety of writing styles to call into question perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself. During the 1980s, Barnes wrote four crime novels under the name "Dan Kavanagh" (Barnes had recently married the literary agent
Pat Kavanagh). The novels centred around the main character Duffy, a former police detective turned security advisor. Duffy is notable because he represents one of Britain's first bisexual male detectives. Barnes has said the use of a pseudonym is "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have". While
Metroland, also published in 1980, took Barnes eight years to write,
Duffy and the rest of the Kavanagh novels typically took less than two weeks each to put to paper—an experiment to test "what it would be like writing as fast as I possibly could in a concentrated way". During the 1990s, Barnes wrote several additional novels and works of journalism. In 1991, he published
Talking It Over, about a contemporary love triangle, in which the three characters take turns to talk to the reader, reflecting on common events. This was followed by a sequel published in 2000 called
Love, etc, which revisited the characters ten years on. Barnes's novel
The Porcupine (1992) again deals with a historical theme as it depicts the trial of Stoyo Petkanov, the former leader of a collapsed Communist country in Eastern Europe, as he stands trial for crimes against his country.
England, England (1998) is a humorous novel that explores the idea of national identity as the entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman creates a theme park on the Isle of Wight that resembles some of the tourist spots of England. Barnes is a keen
Francophile, and his 1996 book,
Cross Channel, is a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France.
Arthur & George (2005), a fictional account of a true crime that was investigated by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, launched Barnes's career into the more popular mainstream. It was the first of his novels to be featured on
The New York Times bestsellers list for Hardback Fiction. Barnes's 11th novel,
The Sense of an Ending, published by
Jonathan Cape, was released on 4 August 2011. In October of that year, the book was awarded the
Man Booker Prize. The judges took 31 minutes to decide the winner and head judge,
Stella Rimington, said that
The Sense of an Ending was a "beautifully written book" and the panel thought it "spoke to humankind in the 21st Century."
The Sense of an Ending also won the
Europese Literatuurprijs and was on the
New York Times Bestseller list for several weeks. In 2013, Barnes published
Levels of Life. The first section of the work gives a history of early ballooning and
aerial photography, describing the work of
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. The second part is a short story about
Fred Burnaby and the French actor
Sarah Bernhardt, both also
balloonists. The third part is an essay discussing Barnes's grief over the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh (although she is not named): "You put together two people who have not been put together before . . . Sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed . . . I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart." In
The Guardian,
Blake Morrison said of the third section: "Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief." In 2013, Barnes took on the British government over its "mass closure of public libraries", Britain's "slip down the world league table for literacy" and its "ideological worship of the market – as quasi-religious as nature-worship – and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor". In 2025, Barnes published the essays entitled
Changing My Mind, in which he questions whether it is possible for the Self to change the mind, stating instead that it is the mind that changes our identity, the Self being inside the mind and not something separate from it. Furthermore, these essays contain reflections on memory, in which, developing what
his brother had suggested to him – namely that memory is "an act of the imagination" – Barnes argues that "sometimes we remember as true things that never even happened in the first place; that we may grossly embellish an original incident out of all recognition; that we may cannibalise someone else's memory, and change not just the endings of the stories of our lives, but also their middles and beginnings. I think that memory, over time, changes, and, indeed, changes our mind". ==Personal life==