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Book Review of The Sense of an Ending (Vintage International)

The Sense of an Ending (Vintage International)
reviewed on


Barnes looks back to a college romance with a privileged woman who was hurtful to him, as was her passive-agressive family's comments. Forty years later after a brillant college friend commits suicide, he reexamines meanings of their encounters colored by emotions and his habit of "never getting (read interpreting) anything right" (words his hurtful girlfriend used who ended up marrying the man who took his own life. The author sensitively speaks as an average Joe, albeit a Brit, looking at failed relationships/marriages, loneliness, and the 40 + years of life events ricocheting off his group of college friends.