Before She Met Me

First edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. 183, [1 (blank)]. Black linen cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. Jacket design by Craig Dodd (priced £6.50 to front flap). Published without endpapers, in a print run of 3,000 copies, with outer leaves pasted down. Originally priced at £6.50, most trade copies on the market are price-clipped and stickered with a price tag of £8.95 or £9.95.

Signed by Author to title page. Hint of rubbing to folds and edges of unclipped dustwrapper, else Fine.

Author's second novel. A tale of revenge, in which a jealous historian becomes obsessed by his second wife's past, a former bit actress.

Released in 1982, after Barnes had already published a couple of detective novels under a pseudonym, its mixture of horror and comedy aroused mixed reviews, best exemplified in Philip Larkin's response who thought it "gripping & moving" and named it one of his books of the year. In a sympathetic letter to the author, he judged it "amusing and enjoyable", "very funny, and very observant" and predicted "great success", but admitted to finding it "only half convincing" primarily because "lecturers don't meet starlets".

"An intelligent and addictive entertainment." –New York Times Book Review

[Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Readers' Guides. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006]