Novel of the week: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

last updated 8 January 2015

(Knopf, $24)

“Like all of us,” the narrator of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize–winning novella “has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in vivid memory,” said Justine Jordan in the London Guardian. In the first half of this finely wrought meditation on memory and regret, Tony Webster, a man in his 60s, recalls two key relationships of his school days—with a friend he idolized and with a girlfriend, Veronica, who treated him badly. But our understanding of the story shifts in the book’s second half, once Tony is put on a quest to retrieve a diary his friend wrote before committing suicide decades earlier. Tony soon reconnects with Veronica, and Barnes “generates much suspense” by withholding the diary’s secrets until the final pages, said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. Far more unsettling is what remains “hidden between the lines” of Tony’s placid narration. Barnes is “pointing a hard finger” at all of us who seek to hide from mortality by creating uneventful lives. The accusation’s power will “leave the reader unsettled for days.”