The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A middle aged man, Tony Webster, is in the will of his first girlfriend's mother who has left him 500 pounds and a diary of a friend, Adrian, who had committed suicide years before. This starts him on a quest to discover why she did this and gets his memory working.

The story takes us back to when there were four boys, friends, in school. Later, when Tony's first girlfriend, Veronica, starts going out with Adrian, one of the boy's friends, he writes the most horrible letter imaginable to Adrian.

This story was short, but so thought provoking that it makes you remember your own mistakes and how we try to "remember them differently" so that we might not seem so bad.

When Tony meets Veronica to try to get the diary, he feels that she is acting very strangely, as do I. Her words to him are "you don't get it, you never got it."

I felt bad for Tony because it seemed that he was way over his head as far as his egghead friends were concerned. He was just a guy; did guy things when he was young and made mistakes just like we all do. But his bad letter writing mistake in his youth seemed to have consequences.

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