British author Julian Barnes has written a book that feels like a conversation with a friend you haven’t seen in a long, long while. He’s sitting in the chair opposite you sharing a cup of coffee and he’s recounting the years gone by.

His name is Tony Webster, 60-something, and his story is filled with the stuff of normal life: school days, first serious relationship, professional life, marriage, parenting and on to retirement. He’s got time to think; his life is settled, or it seems so.

Throughout this 2013 Man Booker Prize winner, there is the sense that Tony is not quite who he seems. The twist here is that this realization is dawning on Tony himself.

Barnes has created a meditative but disquieting reflection on the nature of time and memory, and how we may not always remember things as they actually happened, even our own part in them.

This is the discovery Tony makes one typically arranged day as a letter arrives in the mail; it opens up to him a memory, long past, one he thought he had left behind.

At the center of the story is the first serious relationship Tony experiences during his college days, involving Veronica. The relationship is fraught with miscues and cross-purposes on both parts. It eventually comes to a head one day as Tony introduces Veronica to his three college mates.

They walk the streets of London, with each passing site leaving Tony more and more uneasy that Veronica is more interested in Adrian, the intellectual of the group, and the one the others look up to. Veronica and Tony break up and she does wind up with Adrian.

The lynchpin of this finely written brief novel is how Tony deals with the breakup, and the resulting tragedy. Tony’s awareness of what actually happened unfolds slowly, peeling away layer by layer until he is left with a disturbing truth.

Tony Webster has always wanted a peaceable life. Was it peace Tony really wanted and needed, or something else? Has he lived all these years only to discover he isn’t who he thought he was, that what he remembered has less to do with what actually happened than what he needed to remember to preserve the self-image he has constructed … and why?

Barnes takes us on a journey through the life of a very ordinary man to discover some very extraordinary truths in prose as well-wrought as you’ll find today.

Grab a cup of coffee, Tony’s got something to tell you.