Introduction: The Beginning of the End
Cluster 1. Tales of the Masculine Narrative Paradigm
City of Endings: Ian McEwan's Amsterdam
The Lure of the Detective Story: Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans
Writing Like a Boy: Stephen Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse
Writing "Like a Man": Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin
The Metaphoricity of Ending: Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness
Ending in a Pickle: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
A Proliferation of Endings: Graham Swift's Waterland
The Joke's on Freud: D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel
Cluster 2. Undoing the Paradigm-Perhaps
The Shell Game of Ending(s): John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman
"Double" Ending by Misunderstanding: Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange
Is There an Ending in This Text? David Lodge's Changing Places
The Faked Climax and the Anticlimax in Joyce Carol Oates's Bellefleur
Will the Real Author Please Stand Up? Ian McEwan's Atonement
Another Question of Ending: L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between
An Ending Opening to the Future: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Ending Elsewhere: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
Cluster 3. Escaping the Paradigm by Ignoring It
The Great Circle: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook
Recurrent Circles: Nawal El Saadawi's The Fall of the Imam
Is There a Novel in This Text? Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Can Two Novellas Make a Novel? A. S. Byatt's Angels & Insects
Beginning Again-and Again: Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler
Troubling Linearity: Manlio Argueta's Cuzcatlán
The Ending Is in the Beginning: Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body