The sense of no ending

摘要

Readers of Julian Barnes's new book are left wondering what Pat Kavanagh, his wife of 30 years, would have thought of it. She was his literary agent and his emotional ballast, "the heart of my life; the life of my heart" until 2008, when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died within 37 days. Since then, he has written four books. Death has featured prominently in all of them, including "The Sense of an Ending", the novel about youth and memory for which he was awarded the Man Booker prize in 2011.