The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes · b. 1946 · England
Why it matters
A complacent retiree receives a strange bequest that unravels his tidy account of his own youth. Barnes's Booker winner: a slim, devastating study of how memory flatters, edits, and lies.
At a glance
psychological novel
Difficulty 4/10medium pace150 pagesShort and clear, but its unreliable retrospection rewards a wary second look.
Deep dive
Why Tony Webster's account of his own past is the novel's real crime scene, and how a scrap of an old philosophy formula becomes its proof of guilt.
