The end of the story

by Lydia Davis

This engagingly human and candid novel takes us deep into a world of obsession in which a happily settled woman attempts to piece together the fragments of an unresolved episode from her past. She recalls a period when, as a writer in her thirties, she was living and working on the other coast and found herself involved in a powerful yet uncertain relationship with a much younger man. As she examines and reinterprets events from the distance of time, she recounts in absorbing detail the increasing complexity of her experience, its gradual dissolution, and the disorienting spaces it left behind. With ruthless honesty, artful analysis, and crystalline depictions of human and natural landscapes, The End of the Story combines a deeply serious intention with an abiding sense of the absurd as it illuminates the dilemmas of loss and the fallibility of memory.