Publisher's Synopsis
Barry Lyndon is a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in serial form in 1844, about a member of the Irish gentry trying to become a member of the English aristocracy. Thackeray, based the novel on the life and exploits of the Anglo-Irish rake and fortune-hunter Andrew Robinson Stoney. Stanley Kubrick later adapted the novel into the movie Barry Lyndon. Unlike the film, the novel is narrated by Barry himself, who functions as a quintessentially unreliable narrator, perpetually boasting and not realising the bad light in which he casts himself.