by Julius Barnes (Reviewed by Carol Clancy)
Tony Webster, a retired administrator in England, receives an inheritance from a woman he barely knew. Trying to understand the meaning behind this strange and unexpected gift, in Part One of the novel Tony reviews the events leading up to his meeting with this woman, the mother of a girlfriend he had in college. He relays a series of fairly benign events from adolescence and young adulthood, culminating in an inexplicable tragedy almost 40 years ago. In Part Two, we join Tony in the present, separated from his ex-wife and trying desperately to reconnect with his old college girlfriend to understand how and why events unfolded as they did.
This novel is unusual in that it combines a literary style with edge-of-your-seat suspense. The events Tony describes seem perfectly normal in the beginning, but increasingly, the reader starts to feel that something isn't quite adding up. Is Tony a reliable narrator? I'm not sure that question is ever answered. He certainly seems to forget major aspects of the past, but that could be true of anyone getting older. As the story continues, these benign events begin to take on a kind of sinister feel, as if dark secrets are buried underneath the ordinariness of the day-to-day life of the characters. The suspense builds to a somewhat shocking, somewhat confusing, somewhat anti-climactic ending. But even with the less-than-perfect conclusion, the novel is worth reading for its good writing and psychological suspense. (It was made into a movie in 2017.)