Okay. I really REALLY wanted to give this book 4 stars...

But the ending is so rushed I thought I'd somehow gotten a copy of the book that was short a few pages, which is impressive since I read it on my kindle.

The Ending is also a little too pat for my tastes. All along she's got this fantastic unreliable narrator who openly acknowledges that he's unreliable in the best of ways: By simply saying that he's old and doesn't really care. And this works well with the course of the story...until he starts thinking about/seeking redemption, and then he becomes hokey instead of evocative of the emotions he was supposed to stir in me.

This is really a shame because the dual narrative is really interesting, although much stronger in her WWII setting, and I was really looking forward to how she handled the oncoming reconciliations/explosions. This is not to say one shouldn't read it; it's apparent from the first few chapters why this got shortlisted for the booker prize, and it's buttloads better than the Barnes novel that did win. But it steps fairly eagerly into some avoidable pitfalls in the last third of the book that it would have done well without.

Still, it's totally worth a read.