"Elegant, playful, and remarkable." –
The New Yorker "A page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning." –
San Francisco Chronicle "Beautiful. . . . An elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale." –Heller McAlpin, NPR
"Dense with philosophical ideas. . . . It manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story." –Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times "Evelyn Waugh did it in
Brideshead Revisited, as did Philip Larkin in
Jill [and] Kazuo Ishiguro in
The Remains of the Day. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art." –
The New York Times Book Review "[A] jewel of conciseness and precision. . . .
The Sense of an Ending packs into so few pages so much that the reader finishes it with a sense of satisfaction more often derived from novels several times its length." –
The Los Angeles Times "Exquisitely crafted, sophisticated, suspenseful, and achingly painful,
The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on history, memory, and individual responsibility." –
The Philadelphia Inquirer "Clever, provocative. . . . A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away." –
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . It's highly original as well. And complicated, just like life." –
New York Journal of Books "Ominous and disturbing.... This outwardly tidy and conventional story is one of Barnes's most indelible [and] looms oppressively in our minds." –
The Wall Street Journal "At 163 pages,
The Sense of an Ending is the longest book I have ever read, so prepare yourself for rereading. You won't regret it." –Jane Juska,
The San Francisco Chronicle "With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful." –
The Washington Post "Ferocious. . . . A book for the ages." –
Cleveland Plain Dealer "Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . At times, side-splittingly funny, at others, brutally honest, but always delightfully well observed. . . . Ironically, despite focusing on endings, and on suicide, this is a tremendously life-affirming work. It's highly original as well. And complicated, just like life." –
New York Journal of Books "Elegiac yet potent,
The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct - and sometimes entirely erase - our pasts. . . . Barnes's highly wrought meditation on aging gives just as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken as it does to the momentum of its own plot." –
Vogue "Novel, fertile and memorable . . . . A highly wrought meditation on aging, memory and regret." –
The Guardian (London)
"A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away. . . . Clever, provocative. . . . Barnes reminds his readers how fragile is the tissue of impressions we conveniently rely upon as bedrock." –
Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Brief, beautiful. . . . That fundamentally chilling question–Am I the person I think I am?–turns out to be a surprisingly suspenseful one. . . . As Barnes so elegantly and poignantly reveals, we are all unreliable narrators, redeemed not by the accuracy of our memories but by our willingness to question them." –
The Boston Globe. "Quietly mesmerizing. . . . A slow burn, measured but suspenseful, this compact novel makes every slyly crafted sentence count." –
The Independent (London)
"Deliciously intriguing...with complex and subtle undertones [and] laced with Barnes' trademark wit and graceful writing." –
The Washington Times