The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair is a novel by the English writer Graham Greene, published in 1951 and set in London during and just after the Second World War.

Bendrix describes his own account as a record of hate rather than love, and the book's method is to let him be right about that: he hires a private investigator to follow the woman he says he has finished with, and he is jealous of everyone, including a rival he invents. What he eventually reads is Sarah's diary, and the novel's central turn is a change of explanation rather than a change of events, since what he discovers is that she was not unfaithful in the way he assumed and that the reason for her decision is one he has no language for. Greene drew on his own affair with Catherine Walston for the story, dedicated the British edition to her initial and the American one to her name, and used small pieces of his own circumstances, including a house that was damaged in the Blitz. It is the last of the four novels in which his concerns as a Catholic convert shape the plot, after Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter, and it has been filmed twice, in 1955 and 1999.