What is the focus of Julian Barnes’s novel Departure(s)?

Julian Barnes’s novel Departure(s) (2026) blends fiction and memoir, focusing on a writer named Julian who has cancer (which Barnes was diagnosed with in 2020). It includes the tale of the relationship between two of the narrator’s college friends, whom he introduced to each other. Barnes, who in 2011 won the Booker Prize for fiction for The Sense of an Ending, has stated that this is his last novel.