"Wonderfully fresh, crackling with nostalgic irreverence." --Vogue

"Barnes's books ... celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions.... They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: esthetic bliss." --Chicago Sun-Times

"If all works of fiction were as thoughtful, as subtle, as well constructed, and as funny as Metroland, there would be no more talk of the death of the novel." --New Statesman

"Julian Barnes is one of a handful of innovative English novelists who have succeeded in pulling the English novel out of the provincial rut in which it lay." --Newsday

"Flighty, playful ... Barnes succeeds in vividly re-creating teenage precociousness, particularly what it feels like to be a young male encountering love and sex." --Los Angeles Times

"Barnes writes like a dream." --Village Voice Literary Supplement