I'm going to stick my neck out here and proclaim this recently published book by Julian Barnes a classic. It won the 2011 Booker so I don't have to stand alone in declaring it an unusually perceptive and beautifully written novel. Of all the wonderful books I read this year - and there were boatloads of them in 2011 - this one stood out.

Perhaps the book's impact was so strong because a couple of months ago an old friend sent me some letters that I had written to her in 1962 and 1963. The shock of reading my own words, long forgotten, was intense. I had just read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a book that I loved but thought at the time was obscure. I had a distinctly negative reaction to some other author, justly so. I was so very young, so silly, emphasized all the wrong things and overlooked the important events that were happening in my life.

In Barnes' novel the narrator is sent a letter than he wrote many years before, which he has remembered as very different from the actual letter he is now faced with. The letter makes him re-examine the story he has told himself about his life and the lives of his friends from the past. The treatment of memory and one's personal myth is brilliant. The Sense of an Ending is a book not for youth but for old age. Stunning.

2011 No 173