The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster is a divorced, retired arts administrator in his sixties living a careful suburban life when a lawyer's letter arrives about a small bequest from the mother of his university girlfriend Veronica. The package includes a sum of money and the diary of his friend Adrian Finn, who killed himself at twenty-two. Tony has not thought hard about Veronica, Adrian, or that summer in over forty years, and the diary forces him to reconstruct what actually happened. Barnes splits the book between Tony's school-and-university years in the 1960s and the present-day investigation, with every memory the reader trusts giving way under the weight of what the bequest reveals.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A retired Englishman in his sixties receives a bequest that forces him to reconstruct a university friendship and a suicide he had filed away forty years earlier.
Yes. The Sense of an Ending won the 2011 Booker Prize. Julian Barnes had been a finalist three previous times before winning.
Yes. A 2017 film adaptation directed by Ritesh Batra and starring Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling was released. The film follows the novel's structure of memory and reinterpretation.
The Sense of an Ending was written by Julian Barnes, published in 2011 by Vintage Books.
The Sense of an Ending is 154 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Sense of an Ending takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
The Sense of an Ending is a standalone novel by Julian Barnes, not part of a series.
The Sense of an Ending is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
