‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ This is the definition of history attributed to fictional historian Patrick Lagrange in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. In its fussy, pseudo-academic way, Lagrange’s aphorism captures the thesis of Barnes’s novel. In Stone Arabia, which reads like The Sense of an Ending’s younger, cooler sister, Dana Spiotta has her antihero Nik Worth express the same idea rather more pithily: ‘Self-curate or disappear.’

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