“But time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

 --Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending.

As the narrator, Tony Webster, in his sixties, recounts his past, there is love, break-ups, and reconciliations. Then a letter from a lawyer arrives informing that mother of his ex-lover has bequeathed him five hundred pounds and a couple of documents. We read on till the narrator makes a discovery towards the end of the novella.

There is a fineness to Julian Barnes’ writing which makes it endearing. Despite a disquieting plot, he pulls it off with elan. On this novella, the Independent manages to nail with the words: 'Mesmerising...the concluding scenes grips like a thriller -a whodunnit of memory and morality.' 

This work, (as well as Levels of Life) as The Guardian notes about his The Noise of Time, (a fictional biography of Dmitri Shostakovich) "gives us the breadth of a whole life within the pages of a slim book."