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Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.

 

“A dexterously crafted narrative of unlooked-for consequences, the book increasingly takes on the momentum of a taut horror tale: a 21st-century successor to the great suspense novellas — quivering not just with tension but with psychological, emotional and moral reverberations — of late-Victorian and Edwardian masters such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson...”

Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

 

"The Sense of an Ending is a short book, but not a slight one. In it Julian Barnes reveals crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden. He has honed their edges, and polished them to a high gleam."

 

“A slow burn, measured but suspenseful, this compact novel makes every slyly crafted sentence count. In the finale it catches fire ... the concluding scenes grip like a thriller – a whodunnit of memory and morality, and one which detonates a minor, private apocalypse.”

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

 

“A curious aspect of this book is that even though it is brief, it requires an exaggerated act of memory from the reader. By the time I’d finished it I was not absolutely sure which bits I’d remembered correctly, which bits he’d remembered correctly and which bits were “philosophically self-evident”... Barnes is on absolutely top form here. His sentences, each one so simple and precise, are as iridescent as tropical fish, each one individual and distinct, each one expressing a single revelatory insight, thought, image or joke, and yet they work together to produce a perfectly wonderful harmonious shoal, a work of rare and dazzling genius.”

Toby Clements, Telegraph

 

“With its patterns and repetitions, scrutinising its own workings from every possible angle, the novella becomes a highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret. But it gives as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken – lost to memory – as it does to the engine of its own plot.”

Justine Jordan, Guardian

 

“His reputation will surely be enhanced by this book. Do not be misled by its brevity. Its mystery is as deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories.”

Anita Brooker, Telegraph

 

“This book is something like a Ruth Rendell; confounding not just readers' suppositions but also those of the narrator ... The result is adroit and unnerving and Barnes's keen intellect has rarely been so apparent. He, like his contemporaries, McEwan, Amis and Rushdie, is a gin-and-tonic novelist: his books are crisp, cool and provide a kick to the head, but they seldom, as is the case here, touch the heart.”

Christian House, Independent on Sunday

 

“Barnes’s humour never sneers at his characters. As Veronica reads Stefan Zweig in a John Lewis café, as Tony initiates a heated discussion about the precise definition of “hand-cut chips”, it seems that their creator is on their side, extremely fond of words and ideas, a pedant and proud of it ... What is so impressive in Barnes’s fiction is his ability to evoke the chaos and vulnerability that beleaguer human life, while remaining calm and lucid in the face of both. He seems a modern-day Stoic.”

Ruth Scurr, Times

 

“The Sense of an Ending recent winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, is a novel for grown-ups. On the surface, it’s a simple story, but one with complex and subtle undertones. Laced with Mr. Barnes’ trademark wit and graceful writing, Tony's recollections bring to mind issues of memory and aging as well as the humor in situations that the young consider of passionate importance. ‘[W]hat you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.’ How true.”
Washington Times

 

"A precise poignant portrait of the costs and benefits of tiem passing, of friendship, of love. A small masterpiece."

Erica Wagner, The Times

 

“The book brilliantly gives form to this sense of chronological slipperiness. Time shrinks and expands on the page according to Tony's preoccupations. His failed marriage and career fly by in a handful of lines, while momentary trifles are dwelt upon. The result is an elliptical, deeply unnerving piece of writing, one that never lets the reader settle for long.”

Adrian Turpin, Literary Review

 

“Full of insight and intelligence ... Deservedly longlisted for the Man Booker prize, this is a very fine book, skilfully plotted, boldly conceived, cull of bleak insight into the questions of ageing and memory, and producing a very real kick at its end.” 

Justin Cartwright, Observer

 

“Its brevity, however, in no way compromises its intensity – every word has its part to play; with great but invisible skill Barnes squeezes into it not just a sense of the infinite complexity of the human heart but the damage the wrong permutations can cause when combined.”

Michael Prodger, Financial Times

 

“Poised between a straightforward story and a novel of ideas, Barnes has it both ways, just as he often contrives to be so English and so French at once. He succeeds in this partly because he is too clever to let his cleverness get in the way: the ideas are filtered through a mind less agile than his own, so that theory is always bound by character. He is very disciplined, remaining within Tony’s limitations: the style is more restrained, less showy than it has sometimes been in the past, the wit is quieter, more sparingly used.”

Lidija Haas, Times Literary Supplement

 

“Barnes's story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory; on not getting it the first time round - and possibly not even the second, either.  Barnes's revelation is richly ambiguous.”