Chopin Through His Contemporaries: Friends, Lovers, and Rivals (Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance)

Dual natures comprised Chopin's personality. On one hand, he was a highly creative romantic idealist and on the other, a realist trying to cope with the world at large. Documentary evidence illustrates the disparities in his personality as a reflection of these two diverse aspects of his psyche. Of special interest are five previously unpublished letters in English and the unfolding of Chopin's controversial relationships with Tytus Woyciechowski, Julian Fontana, George Sand, and Solange Sand.

The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva

Determined to sever his ties with the Office, Gabriel Allon has retreated to the windswept cliffs of Cornwall with his beautiful Venetian-born wife, Chiara. But once again his seclusion is interrupted by a visitor from his tangled past: the endearingly eccentric London art dealer Julian Isherwood. As usual, Isherwood has a problem. And it is one only Gabriel can solve.

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes

As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife–their fates become inextricably connected.

Flaubert's Parrot By Julian Barnes

A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.

Julian: A Christmas Story - a  review from The Guardian (U.K):

It's 2176 and, following a global technological collapse, the United States has reverted to a pre-electronic age of limited scientific understanding and Puritan social mores. The Sixty States of the Union are ruled by a coalition, the Church of the Dominion, headed by the autocratic President Deklan Comstock. The Union comprises three social groups: the aristos; the "leasing class" of tradesmen; and indentured labourers. Julian tells the rites-of-passage story of low-born Adam Hazzard and his friendship with the nephew of the president, the aristo Julian Comstock, relating how Adam's social conditioning is subtly undermined by Julian's heretical ideas: Darwinism, Einsteinism and DNA. The first-person narrative maintains an uneasy balance between reverence for the status quo and a fearful acknowledgment of the wonders of the past, while the text eschews sensationalism in favour of a thoughtful account of personal change and a skilled evocation of a feudal future.

As Robert J. Sawyer says of Wilson in the introduction to this fine novella, "He's sui generis: a hard-SF writer with the soul of a poet."