He has a couple of adult children he’s never shown much interest in, and an ex- that he meets with for an occasional lunch. The basic story is that we have a man of retirement age who is a doofus. Barnes seems to be a writer that you like or you don’t. There’s not a lot of point in adding an extensive review to book with 12,000 already on GR although it’s interesting to note that its rating, 3.7 is a bit on the low side. “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.” The book is a Booker Prize winner, so we expect and we get great writing.

Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.” Some examples: “…but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed.” And “I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.” And “again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. This is by Julian Barnes so we know it will focus on memory and its tricks. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.Ī novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present.

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.

The sense of an ending review