The Sense of an Ending

Tony Webster is retired, amicably divorced, and content in a small way with a life he has arranged to be unexamined. At school he was one of a group of clever boys joined by Adrian Finn, who was cleverer than all of them and took ideas seriously in a manner they found faintly embarrassing. At university Tony had a girlfriend, Veronica, whose family he visited once for an uncomfortable weekend, and who afterwards took up with Adrian. Then a solicitor's letter arrives. Veronica's mother, a woman Tony met exactly once, has left him five hundred pounds and Adrian's diary, and Veronica will not hand the diary over. What follows is Tony's attempt to establish what actually happened forty years ago, an inquiry obstructed at every turn by an ex-girlfriend who tells him repeatedly that he has never got it and never will. Barnes writes a short, deceptively mild novel about the unreliability of a memory that has been curated for comfort, and the letter Tony eventually reads again, having entirely forgotten writing it, is one of the most quietly devastating reversals in recent English fiction.