The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel by Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize for that year.

Tony Webster looks back at his life from retirement age. He remembers school days, preparing for final exams, a clever boy in a tight group with two other similarly able boys. Then Adrian, a step up in clever, joins their gang, giving nonchalantly impressive answers to questions that their history teacher poses – questions like ‘what is history?’

Tony leaves school. The account of the rest of his life could be seen as a meditation on memory and history. History is ‘the lies of the victors’ says school boy Tony in class. His teacher reminds him that is also the ‘self-delusions of the defeated’. Is Tony one of life’s victors? He’s done pretty well, survived long enough to write the story down. But evidence emerges that he could actually be one of the deluded defeated.

So you can ponder along these lines. But before you start thinking this book is just for seminars and essays, I would point out it’s also a good read that carries you along. There is more than a suggestion that history also carries you along, doing what it does, caring nothing for efforts to understand or shape it. Going back to the school scenes, one particular lad who didn’t merit membership of the History Boys’ gang, was asked to characterise life during the reign of Henry VIII. He suggests that the word ‘conflict’ would sum it up. When pressed for further details, he tries, ‘much conflict’. These wise words actually end the book. This unknown boy, a most minor of characters, turns out to have the final say. Maybe life’s winners and losers share the same ambivalent history in the end.