---
product_id: 43504083
title: "Cross Channel"
price: "฿1368"
currency: THB
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 10
url: https://www.desertcart.co.th/products/43504083-cross-channel
store_origin: TH
region: Thailand
---

# Cross Channel

**Price:** ฿1368
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Cross Channel
- **How much does it cost?** ฿1368 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.co.th](https://www.desertcart.co.th/products/43504083-cross-channel)

## Best For

- Customers looking for quality international products

## Why This Product

- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

Cross Channel [Barnes, Julian] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Cross Channel

Review: One of my favourite books - The short stories in this book are some of my favourites. Brambilla is one of the best pieces I have ever read, in my opinion. Captures the world of cycle racing.
Review: Accomplished short stories from a renowned novelist - Ten stories, each a variation on the theme of the British in France. A British general, held prisoner by Napoleon, settles into his dotage with memories of two earlier expeditions to France, one a Grand Tour of sorts as a very young man, the other a challenge cricket match that was pretermitted by the French Revolution. British contractors, with their British navvies, construct the railroad from Paris to Rouen to Le Havre. Two English spinsters acquire a dilapidated estate in Pauillac and learn the winemaking chicaneries of vinage and coupage. An aging Englishwoman, who works as a copyeditor on a dictionary project, continues her annual pilgrimage of fifty years to the grave of her brother at Cabaret Rouge, one of the cemeteries for soldiers killed in the Great War. A bicycle racer and his girlfriend, a stripper, recount stories of the Tour de France and other races, including stratagems to fool the drug-testers. And five more. The settings of the stories range from the 1660's to 2015 (the last of the stories engages in a slight temporal projection). Published in 1996, CROSS CHANNEL was Julian Barnes's first collection of short stories. And it reveals him to be a master of the form. With many books of short stories, the contents all come from the same mold. Not so CROSS CHANNEL, in which Barnes employs different styles and voices, always in an accomplished and assured fashion. What the stories have in common is grace, charm, sophistication, and their humaneness. To me, two of the stories were particularly striking. "Experiment" is about the time, in 1928, when the narrator's Uncle Freddy was enlisted by the Surrealists to participate in their sexual research. Uncle Freddy was challenged to distinguish between two young women he had sex with blindfolded. The story ends with a clever twist, an engaging analogue from the world of wine. In the last story of the book, "Tunnel", the narrator - who turns out to be Julian Barnes himself - is taking the Eurostar from London to Paris, via the Chunnel. The story consists of Barnes's musings about his fellow travellers and about aging, as well as remembrances of travels from his past. For example: "He remembered . . . no, that verb, he increasingly found, was often inexact. He seemed to remember, or he retrospectively imagined, or he reconstructed, from films and books with the aid of a nostalgia as runny as old Camembert, a time when travellers crossing Europe by train would become acquaintances for the length of the journey." CROSS CHANNEL is not usually cited as one of Barnes's best or most noted books. To my mind, it deserves to be better known. As, perhaps, does Barnes as an author. For example, why isn't he Sir Julian Barnes? Four-and-a-half stars.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #244,403 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1,916 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction #2,019 in Short Stories Anthologies #3,877 in Short Stories (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars (78) |
| Dimensions  | 5.19 x 0.51 x 8 inches |
| Edition  | Reprint |
| ISBN-10  | 067976755X |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0679767558 |
| Item Weight  | 3.99 ounces |
| Language  | English |
| Print length  | 224 pages |
| Publication date  | February 11, 1997 |
| Publisher  | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |

## Images

![Cross Channel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71iAV6btx3L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of my favourite books
*by M***S on October 9, 2013*

The short stories in this book are some of my favourites. Brambilla is one of the best pieces I have ever read, in my opinion. Captures the world of cycle racing.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Accomplished short stories from a renowned novelist
*by R***N on October 20, 2012*

Ten stories, each a variation on the theme of the British in France. A British general, held prisoner by Napoleon, settles into his dotage with memories of two earlier expeditions to France, one a Grand Tour of sorts as a very young man, the other a challenge cricket match that was pretermitted by the French Revolution. British contractors, with their British navvies, construct the railroad from Paris to Rouen to Le Havre. Two English spinsters acquire a dilapidated estate in Pauillac and learn the winemaking chicaneries of vinage and coupage. An aging Englishwoman, who works as a copyeditor on a dictionary project, continues her annual pilgrimage of fifty years to the grave of her brother at Cabaret Rouge, one of the cemeteries for soldiers killed in the Great War. A bicycle racer and his girlfriend, a stripper, recount stories of the Tour de France and other races, including stratagems to fool the drug-testers. And five more. The settings of the stories range from the 1660's to 2015 (the last of the stories engages in a slight temporal projection). Published in 1996, CROSS CHANNEL was Julian Barnes's first collection of short stories. And it reveals him to be a master of the form. With many books of short stories, the contents all come from the same mold. Not so CROSS CHANNEL, in which Barnes employs different styles and voices, always in an accomplished and assured fashion. What the stories have in common is grace, charm, sophistication, and their humaneness. To me, two of the stories were particularly striking. "Experiment" is about the time, in 1928, when the narrator's Uncle Freddy was enlisted by the Surrealists to participate in their sexual research. Uncle Freddy was challenged to distinguish between two young women he had sex with blindfolded. The story ends with a clever twist, an engaging analogue from the world of wine. In the last story of the book, "Tunnel", the narrator - who turns out to be Julian Barnes himself - is taking the Eurostar from London to Paris, via the Chunnel. The story consists of Barnes's musings about his fellow travellers and about aging, as well as remembrances of travels from his past. For example: "He remembered . . . no, that verb, he increasingly found, was often inexact. He seemed to remember, or he retrospectively imagined, or he reconstructed, from films and books with the aid of a nostalgia as runny as old Camembert, a time when travellers crossing Europe by train would become acquaintances for the length of the journey." CROSS CHANNEL is not usually cited as one of Barnes's best or most noted books. To my mind, it deserves to be better known. As, perhaps, does Barnes as an author. For example, why isn't he Sir Julian Barnes? Four-and-a-half stars.

### ⭐⭐⭐ coda to Braithwhaite's ruminations on France and life
*by S***N on July 16, 2007*

The Brits abroad often bring to mind images of endomorphic, bawling, sunburned men drunkenly marauding in the south of Spain, or perhaps at an England football away match. Not, of course, in the hands of Julian Barnes, who strictly demarcates his fiction between the crass and vulgar (his pulp 'Duffy' detective novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh) and his more regular literary output which often focuses on questions of France, and its relationship with Barnes's native Britain. Barnes is a phenomenally cultured Francophile (for a manifestation of this, check out his essay collection 'Something to Declare') and his prose at its best is playful, witty and detailed. Barnes, the linguist, and former lexicographer and law student has a keen eye for the curious details of life. He can spin fictional gold out of a simple engraving on a stone, or a bottle of wine, or an elegant account of Medieval Religious persecution. This he did to great effect in his 1984 novel, Flaubert's Parrot, which is one of the most elegant and playful novels ever written, and to lesser, but still successful effect, in his 1989 big canvas novel 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'. Cross Channel takes the themes developed in these two novels - love, history, art, food, persecution, memory - and adds to them a sort of coda in the form of ten elegant, formally sophisticated stories. It should be said at the outset that Cross Channel is not as accomplished a book as the previous novels mentioned, but is still worth reading as form of the most elegant type of travel literature. All of the stories feature British (and Irish) people in France. The first, and maybe best story, Interference concerns an elderly English composer who wants his wife to hear his final compositional masterpiece on the radio but can't get decent reception unless everyone else in their isolated French village is silent. Junction is a fairly flat story telling the story of the Paris - Rouen railway, partially built by British navies. Experiment is a tongue in cheek pastiche of surrealism: a young man tries to unravel the story of his lumpen, heavy drinking uncle's participation in a sexual experiment with Andre Breton and pals. Melon is another fairly disappointing story which revolves around an aristocratic man's unawareness of the origins of his food, and a cricket match around the time of the French Revolution. Evermore is a cracker, a poignant story about an elderly woman who makes annual pilgrimages to northern France where her son was killed in the First World War. It is a quiet, reflective piece on the difficulties of maintaining memory over the years, with the ghost of Kipling lingering beneath the surface. Gnossiene is a short piece that doesn't quite come off about a man travelling to a literary conference to a destination that seems to be a hoax. Barnes here has fun, based on his own experiences being interviewed by literary critics in France, with contrasting the French and Anglo Saxon mindsets 'so Monsieur Clements, le mythe et la realite?'. Dragons takes us back a while (there is great historical sweep in these stories) to a time when ignorance, superstition and religious persecution ruled in Medieval France. Brambilla brings us back to modern themes with some riffs on the Tour de France - including the tale of the drug raddled cyclist who offered his girlfriend's urine as a sample: 'the good news is you're clean. The bad news is you're pregnant'. Hermitage is a quintessential Barnes tale of women and wine set in the late 19th Century - two English spinsters buy a vineyard in France and set about creating their own version of an idyll copied a century later by middle class Brits: 'Idling glances proposed a different life: in a timbered Normandy farmhouse, a trim Burgundy manoir, a backwater chateau of the Berry.' The final story, Tunnel, stretches the timescale into the future (sometime soon after 2009 I think we are meant to surmise judging by the vintage of wine drunk in that story). Barnes seems to be fond of setting his stories in the near future - he used the same trick in 'Staring at the Sun, published in 1985 but the time frame for the end of that novel soon approaching). Perhaps he plans to read over these stories in his old age and see how they have stood the test of time. The narrator of Tunnel is an elderly English novelist (Barnes himself perhaps?) who reflects on ageing and France on a Eurostar trip from London to Paris. Here's a passage from that story which could only come from the pen of Julian Barnes: 'He turned away form himself and began to speculate about his immediate neighbours. To his right were three fellows in suits plus a chap in a striped blazer; opposite him an elderly woman. Elderly: that's to say, about the same age as himself. He said the word again, slid it around his mouth. He'd never much cared for it - there was something slimy and ingratiating about its use - and now that he was himself what the word denoted, he liked it even less. Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead; this was how life was conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this was how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined. A third sense there too: life refused, life not fully grasped. 'I see now that I have always been afraid of life,' Flaubert had once conceded. Was this true of all writers? And was it, in any case, a necessary truth: in order to be a writer, you needed in some sense to decline life?'...

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.co.th/products/43504083-cross-channel](https://www.desertcart.co.th/products/43504083-cross-channel)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Thailand*
*Store origin: TH*
*Last updated: 2026-02-24*