The End of the Story - Softcover

"Constructed in brutally perceptive and dazzlingly revelatory prose, this is a stunning work."--Booklist

"This breathtakingly elegant and unsentimental first novel is about passion, regret, and memory: about the psychology of the spot where recollection and loss intersect."--Details

"Extraordinary...the risks Davis takes by depriving herself of a traditional structure are enormous."--Newsday

"[The End of the Story] succeeds in...giving the reader both the story and the painful work that goes into its making, and as such it is not only beautiful, but an extraordinary and very modern achievement."--The New York Observer

'It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.'

Mislabelled boxes, confusing notes, wrong turnings - such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she organises her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit and what seems to be candour, she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction

Back in print at last, this is Lydia Davis's first - and so far only - novel.

'No contemporary writer has so bravely explored the severe elegance of the thinking woman' Village Voice

'Brilliant' New Yorker

'Extraordinary' Newsday

'Breathtakingly elegant' Details

' Beautifully written' Marie Claire

'Astonishing' Elle