Robert Lukens

And there's this phrase that recurs through the novel of, she refers to having this chaotic grief, but we only see flashes of it.

We're not quite sure what it's attached to.

And there's childhood weeping and there's

the horse and the plumes of a feather and Camelot and her father.

And it all just comes together in those final couple of paragraphs.

And I think that just leaves you with this incredible sense when you close the book for the final time.

That's what you carry away.

But oh, those last paragraphs.

Yeah, and if there's not complete resolution at the end of this novel, there's this just sense of some kind of peace coming into the room.

You can feel it in Nora.

She's being kinder to herself.

She's sort of finding the ability to be kind to the people around her.

So it leaves you just with this sense of the sun coming down on a Brisbane summer night into the mango tree.

And it's maybe not all tied up, but there's some peace there.

Yeah, I think, and maybe it's an obvious one, but it was a very popular book and quite recent was Julian Barnes' Sense of an Ending, won the Booker Prize.

And in that we have our central character is Tony Webster and he's later in his life and he learns he's been left this diary from one of his school friends who took his own life while they were at university.

Through the various events in the novel to try and get his hands on this diary, he's forced to re-examine these events.

memories of his youth I guess we learn that Tony has constructed something of a false memory of that time to protect himself from his own actions at that time and it made me think of this the truthful fictions from Jessica Anderson's Tira Lira this idea that Nora talks about these truthful fictions we tell other people and ourselves and to me it's all about this idea that

Memories don't just fall away or change shape only as a product of time passing or our brain cells dying.

But they're actively reshaped, that memories aren't always this passive thing, that they are constantly being actively reshaped to fit our needs.