The Sense of an Ending: A Novel

"At least two winners of The Booker Prize proper (by which I mean, the prize for books published in English, rather than fiction in translation) have been very short books – novels bordering on novellas. Julian Barnes ‘ The Sense of an Ending is a haunting story that centres on the death of an old schoolfriend of the narrator, and a suicide note pronouncing that a free person “has a philosophical duty to examine the nature of their life, and may then choose to renounce it.” From there, a complex backstory unfolds, exploring the fallibility of memory, and how we all construct narratives of ourselves. It’s been many years since I read it, but certain aspects haunt me still, particularly one moonlit scene in which the characters watch the Severn Bore, a tidal phenomenon in which the flow of water in an estuary is briefly reversed. Ian McEwan is well known for his short novels (he once told the New Yorker that he felt the novella was “the perfect form of prose fiction”) and his Booker-winning tale of sexual frustration On Chesil Beach sails in barely over the line, at around 55,000 words. A novella is usually considered to run between 20,000 and 40,000 words, although the boundary is somewhat blurred. I also have a particular soft spot for The Cement Garden , his perverse and incestuous first novel, in which four orphaned children decide to hide their mother’s death from the authorities by entombing her in concrete in their cellar. Horrifyingly good. If you’re looking for a short book because of a poor attention span (thanks pandemic anxiety, doomscrolling, depression, stress, overwork and the endless interruptions of small children!) you might find yourself drawn to a book served in easily digestible chunks. We have plenty of short story recommendations elsewhere on the site, a short story being perfect if you have a spare half hour or so. (I myself have been carrying a copy of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table in my jacket pocket for a couple of weeks, and taking it out in moments of stillness.) Get the weekly Five Books newsletter However, if you’re looking for a longer, book-length narrative to linger over, a fragmentary novel might be a perfect solution. Often unfolding as a collage of vignettes, lyrical snatches or brief monologues, this form of literature is perfect for the present moment, echoing the disjointed nature Covid-era living, and served in thin, savourable slivers. Some favourite recent examples of mine are Maggie Nelson’s Bluets , a strange and beautiful meditation on her love for the colour blue, tinged with sex and heartbreak, and broken down into hundreds of numbered parts; and Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers , whose structure perfectly mirrors the fragmented experience of living through grief."