Not his best, but certainly a good, and often surprising read. ( )

This is the story of Graham Hendricks and his obsession with his wife's past.

After seeing his wife, Ann, in a minor role in a film, Graham becomes obsessed with her past relationships. He questions her about past boyfriends, and attends every movie she ever had a small role in. As the story unfolds, we watch Graham move from obsession to insanity.

This is a well written novel. The conclusion, while inevitable, nonetheless manages to be surprising. ( )

There’s no denying that Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me is an absorbing, even compelling, account of one man’s descent from jealousy into obsession and ultimately to insanity. Graham, happily and then unsatisfying married, falls for Ann, for whom he leaves his wife and daughter. With Ann, a sometime bit part actress seems to offer him the solace and companionship which Graham has just discovered that he’s been lacking all these years. By then, through the offices of his bitter ex-wife, he happens to see a film featuring, albeit briefly, Ann. He becomes obsessed with her past, convulsively gathering evidence of her former liaisons and boyfriends and even passing acquaintances. But he can’t leave it there: and what he imagines his wife did before she met him becomes worse that what she actually did. Sad, funny and disturbing, Barnes’ prose is as always, well-measured and quite elegant. Yet there is something just a little unsatisfying about this novel. Never quite convinced that Graham’s descent is totally self-driven, the reader is left wondering about the machinations of his friends and his ex-wife particularly: the questions surrounding their role are never quite resolved and yet too closely drawn to remain provocatively ambiguous. Barnes has done a lot better. ( )