Julian Barnes 
Flaubert »s Parrot 

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction
Flaubert »s Parrot deals with Flaubert, parrots, bears and railways; with our sense of the past and our sense of abroad; with France and England, life and art, sex and death, George Sand and Louise Colet, aesthetics and redcurrant jam; and with its enigmatic narrator, a retired English doctor, whose life and secrets are slowly revealed.
A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert »s Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.