Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending (Vintage International)

"Elegant, playful, and remarkable." --The New Yorker

"A page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Beautiful. . . . An elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale." --Heller McAlpin, NPR

"Dense with philosophical ideas. . . . It manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Evelyn Waugh did it in Brideshead Revisited, as did Philip Larkin in Jill [and] Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art." --The New York Times Book Review

"[A] jewel of conciseness and precision.... The Sense of an Ending packs into so few pages so much that the reader finishes it with a sense of satisfaction more often derived from novels several times its length." --The Los Angeles Times

"Exquisitely crafted, sophisticated, suspenseful, and achingly painful, The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on history, memory, and individual responsibility." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Clever, provocative. . . . A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away." --The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . It's highly original as well. And complicated, just like life." --New York Journal of Books

"Elegiac yet potent, The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct--and sometimes entirely erase--our pasts." --Vogue

"Ominous and disturbing.... This outwardly tidy and conventional story is one of Barnes's most indelible [and] looms oppressively in our minds." --The Wall Street Journal

"At 163 pages, The Sense of an Ending is the longest book I have ever read, so prepare yourself for rereading. You won't regret it." --Jane Juska, The San Francisco Chronicle

"With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful." --The Washington Post

"Ferocious. . . . A book for the ages." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . At times, side-splittingly funny, at others, brutally honest, but always delightfully well observed. . . . Ironically, despite focusing on endings, and on suicide, this is a tremendously life-affirming work. It's highly original as well. And complicated, just like life." --New York Journal of Books

"Elegiac yet potent, The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct - and sometimes entirely erase - our pasts. . . . Barnes's highly wrought meditation on aging gives just as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken as it does to the momentum of its own plot." --Vogue

"Novel, fertile and memorable . . . . A highly wrought meditation on aging, memory and regret." --The Guardian (London)

"A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away. . . . Clever, provocative. . . . Barnes reminds his readers how fragile is the tissue of impressions we conveniently rely upon as bedrock." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Brief, beautiful. . . . That fundamentally chilling question--Am I the person I think I am?--turns out to be a surprisingly suspenseful one. . . . As Barnes so elegantly and poignantly reveals, we are all unreliable narrators, redeemed not by the accuracy of our memories but by our willingness to question them." --The Boston Globe.

"Quietly mesmerizing. . . . A slow burn, measured but suspenseful, this compact novel makes every slyly crafted sentence count." --The Independent (London)

"Deliciously intriguing...with complex and subtle undertones [and] laced with Barnes' trademark wit and graceful writing." --The Washington Times

This Man Booker Prize–winning novel is now a major motion picture.

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.
 
This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.