Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves.” Doesn’t sound convincing? Give this a quote a glance from Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending before you read on: “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Now, imagine the same memories are shared through the pen of Julian Barnes Well, there’s no way you would ignore. Would you patiently sit and listen to this old stranger? Maybe, for the sake of courtesy you would listen for a while and quickly pick a reason from your quiver to slip away. Let’s just hypothetically say he offers to share his memories with you. Someone who is living all by himself after retiring and is also divorced. And let’s just say he starts to share his memories from school and the days after with you. Imagine you’re at a cafe or taking a walk in a park and you bump into an elderly man. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. The Sense of an Ending follows a sexagenarian man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about – until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Narrator: Narrated in First person through a retired man named Anthony Webster.

Major Characters: Anthony “Tony” Webster, Veronica Mary Ford, Adrian Finn, Colin Simpson, Joe Hunt, Phil Dixon, Sarah Ford. Setting Place: Bristol Chislehurst London, England

Tony webster the sense of an ending