by Julian Barnes
4.5 · 4 reviews4 reviews
If you want plot, look elsewhere. If you want precise sentences about memory and loss, this is a small gem.
Barnes has always been good at endings and this one is a beauty. Quietly annihilating.
Read it on a single train journey. It's more of a meditation than a novel and I suspect it will reward a second reading more than a first.
160 pages and not a wasted one. He's writing about endings — of relationships, of lives, of the century — with that dry, exact melancholy nobody else quite manages.