In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware5/30/2023 ![]() The pressure to deliver is immense: questions must be answered, ambiguities resolved, loose ends tied up, judgments passed. Fictional endings help us to make sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives. ![]() Think – spoiler alert – of The Great Gatsby's closing line and how it sums up the novel's overarching theme: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Or how the penultimate sentence of Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn encapsulates the life unlived, all the pain and regret that go with it. The best of them capture the essence of what has gone before and give a sense of completion. Reviews seldom discuss endings, for obvious reasons, yet they're fundamental to a reader's satisfaction. ![]() In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen called it the "tell-tale compression of the pages", the sense that a novel is coming to a close. ![]()
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