The Sense of an Ending

Just finished reading Julian Barnes, Booker Award winning novel, The Sense of an Ending. Awesome! Young Adrian Finn questions the accuracy of historical accounts written years after events have occurred. How good of a detective does the historian need to be? How well should we expect that  witnesses to events remember what happened? Can one trust the accounts of journals, letter and articles written at the time? 

The story is narrated by Tony, a retiree in his sixties who tells his own tale as well as the tale of an old friend who dies young. Tony has lived a comfy life only to allow it - and his memories of the past - to be disrupted when he accepts an inheritance from the mother of an old lover named Veronica. It could be simple - take the money and run. But there is a diary involved.

The diary was left to Tony, and he wants to read it but Veronica has it and will not give it to him. However, she gives him one entry and an old letter. Veronica goadsTony on to do some detective work to sort out what took place after she and Tony broke up. He tries to figure it out from the clues she gives, but he can't get it. She says he never will.

As he begins to piece clues together, his memories and the story shape-shift. A clever reader is going to figure it all out long before Tony does, but the underlying theme of uncovering history keeps the book interesting. The Sense of an Ending leaves as many questions unanswered as it does those solved.