The Sense of an Ending

The Book Club meets monthly over drinks, and everybody is welcome to attend, whether they've had the chance to read the book or not.

This month's book is described by one review as follows: Cleverly, Barnes compresses a story with long temporal sweep into a scant 150 pages. The cleverness resides not only in the way he has caught just how second-rate Webster's mind is without driving the reader to tears of boredom but in the way he has effectively doubled the length of the book by giving us a final revelation that obliges us to reread it. Without overstating his case in the slightest, 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.