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The End of the Story
The End of the Story
Nov 12, 2025 9:03 AM

Author:Lydia Davis

The End of the Story

The first and only novel by Lydia Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013.

'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.

'Extraordinary' Newsday

'Brilliant' New Yorker

'Breathtakingly elegant' Details

'Beautifully written' Marie Claire

'Astonishing' Elle

Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, most recently Can't and Won't. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

Reviews

Unputdownable . . . [The End of the Story] freed me from the preconceptions I had then about the way novels were supposed to work . . . it deals with the heat and the thirst of infatuation, the desperation to find an end to the torment when a desired object won't reciprocate

—— Olivia Sudjic , Observer, 'Summer Reads 2023'

Can't and Won't is the most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years

—— John Freeman , Boston Globe

Lydia Davis's short stories are perfected economies, witty devices, precision-made, primed to release intelligence, philosophy, hilarity. They celebrate the thinking universe while they redefine the possibilities of the form. There is no other writer quite like her

—— Ali Smith

Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. . . one of the best writers in America

—— Colm Tóibín , Daily Telegraph

Her work is exquisite, finely wrought and devastating. . . Read her now!

—— A. M. Homes

Extraordinary

—— Newsday

Breathtakingly elegant

—— Details

Brilliant

—— New Yorker

A hugely enjoyable journey though the riches of [Wood’s] extraordinarily well-stocked mind.

—— Good Book Guide

His [Wood’s] concept of literature is generous, inclusive and fundamentally democratic.

—— Michael Lindgren , Washington Post

Few can match Welsh's verve for spinning a yarn, for putting you inside the minds of characters that are by turn grotesque, joyful, hilarious and – crucially – utterly compelling.

—— Sam Parker , Esquire

A Decent Ride, while his most comedic novel, is also his darkest.

—— David Whitehouse , Shortlist

More furious, filthy brilliance from Welsh.

—— Forever Sports

Packed with filthy charm and characters old and new, it was a comic triumph with plenty of depth through its exploitation of celebrity culture and the treatment of sex workers.

—— Rowena McIntosh , The List

Welsh carries realism to its limits and sometimes beyond… [He] Creates a world more real than a great many worlds we enter in today’s fiction.

—— Patrick Anderson , Washington Post

A gripping read that fans of Dorothy Koomson will love

—— Closer

I laughed aloud at this funny, outrageous story of a girl from Wolverhampton council estate who reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde

—— Woman & Home

as irreverent, amusing and vibrant as Moran herself

—— GQ

rowdy and fearless ... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways

—— New York Times

Ms. Moran['s] ... funny and cheerfully dirty coming-of-age novel has a hard kernel of class awareness ... sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways.

—— Dwight Garner , New York Times

there’s so much real feeling too. Johanna’s vulnerability and bravado, as she moves out of her world and falls in love is beautifully done’ or ‘ and running through it all, with a visceral power that most writers should envy, is the shame and grinding anxiety of being poor

—— Sunday Times

Moran also writes brilliantly about music, and especially about what music can do. She carries Johanna through this novel with incredible verve, extravagant candour, and a lot of heart. Johanna is … a wonderful heroine. A heroine who cares, who bravely sallies forth and makes things happen, who gives of herself, who is refreshingly unashamed. She’s so confident, it’s glorious

—— The Independent on Sunday

an entertaining read, with Moran in fine voice – hilarious, wild, imaginative and highly valuable…Moran is in danger of becoming to female masturbation what Keats was to Nightingales…

—— Barbara Ellen , The Observer

rude, big-hearted, wise-cracking novel…so filthy she’ll make you blush

—— Christina Patterson , The Sunday Times

This is going to be a bestseller…A sharp, hilarious and controversial read

—— The Bookseller

Ali Smith is a master of language. Vigorous, vivid writing that is Ali Smith incarnate

—— Alice Thompson , Herald

Ingeniously conceived, gloriously inventive

—— NPR

Dizzyingly ambitious . . . endlessly artful, creating work that feels infinite in its scope and intimate at the same time. [A] swirling panoramic

—— Atlantic

Brilliant . . . the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don't seem entirely possible

—— Washington Post

Having read this now twice, in both directions so to speak, I've decided - and I do not write this flippantly - that Ali Smith is a genius

—— Susan McCallum , LA Review of Books

Approaches the world as only a novel can. The book moves not so much in a straight line as in a twisting helix pattern . . . delivers the heat of life and the return of beauty in the face of loss

—— Kenneth Miller , Everyday Ebook

A unique conversation between past and present

—— Milwaukee Journal

Wildly inventive . . . lyrical, fresh

—— Bustle Magazine
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