"The Sense of an Ending"

Julian Barnes' Booker Prize-winning novella was on my Christmas list, as it's the current read for our book group. My sister Sarah kindly came up with it, and I've now read it (in what is - for me - record time).

It's a sad story, but intriguing, unfolding as it does right up to the penultimate page. Barnes is at his best writing about recollection of the past. "My memory," his narrator sighs at one point, "has increasingly become a mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation." My feelings precisely.