The Sense of an Ending was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011 and won the Man Booker Prize. At barely 150 pages, it is one of the shortest novels ever to win the award — and its brevity is a formal statement: the novel argues that we understand less about our own lives than we think, and that this understanding diminishes rather than grows with time.
Tony Webster, retired, divorced, peaceable, tells the story of his school friendship with Adrian Finn — brilliant, philosophical, destined for greatness — and the events of their university years: relationships, intellectual posturing, a girlfriend (Veronica) passed from Tony to Adrian. Adrian kills himself. Forty years pass. Then Veronica’s mother’s will leaves Tony Adrian’s diary, and Veronica refuses to hand it over — forcing Tony to reexamine a past he thought he understood.
The novel’s devastating power lies in its gradual revelation that Tony — the narrator, the apparently reasonable man telling us this story — has been unreliable not through malice but through the ordinary human capacity for self-serving memory. What he remembers as youthful thoughtlessness was actually cruelty; what he recalls as a minor incident was actually consequential; and the comfortable story he has told himself about his life is a fiction constructed to protect his self-image.
Barnes’s formal control is extraordinary: every sentence in the first half is calibrated to seem innocent on first reading and terrible on second. The novel rewards — indeed, requires — rereading.
Collecting The Sense of an Ending
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 2011): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- US first (Knopf, 2011): $15–$40