Your really annoying ending to a book?!

[Liltzero]

I've just finished reading a book where the plot was a woman investigating the death of her sister, a death which the police thought was suicide, but she thought murder. The ending was maddening! The reader was left not knowing whether our chief character was murdered by the same man who killed her sister or was she rescued in the nick of the time?!

What books have you read with a frustrating or wrong conclusion or non-conclusion?

"The sense of an ending" ending is frustrating...but in a good way...it makes you think about how we can make up endings whatever way we want or change the narrative. There is no end.
And the same with the Brooklyn sequel Long Island. It's incredibly annoying not to be given the "answer" but then you work harder for a possible answer. In the case of Long Island Jim is unable to make decisions...so we are left with someone in limbo. And feel terribly sorry for him but fed up. Both women are better off without him.

I was disappointed by the ending in Long Island also.
I thought I’d missed something.

The Elegance of the hedgehog.
I was hoping it would improve and dragged myself through it. Ending was just annoying.
Lovely story, but it could have been half the length.

Pigeon English. If you've read it, you'll know what I mean.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson. What a waste of time. My mum recommended it to me as well.

I've now read Long Island four times to work out the meaning of the last bit and indeed the entire book - so the inconclusive ending evidently hooked me..

The ending of Small Pleasures is brutal, but I felt it fitted the story perfectly.

Oh this for the Time Travellers Wife!!

I haven’t seen the film because they (apparently) changed the ending, but all through the book was this issue as to what might happen, then it didn’t in the film…

Oh I am pretty sure I read that book about 10 years ago, no idea what it was called or who it was by, but I remember it being a total page turner and then WHAT? Like, it was implied the dishy doctor jumped out of the bushes and got her and she never saw it coming? Something like that? Didn't like it either.

Also, I read one a year or two ago (again, hopeless at remembering the title or the author, someone leant it to me) about a woman who was supposed to be Croatian but ended up working as a high class escort in London... it started OK but got steadily stupider and ended with the most unconvincing scene with a Croatian couple having a conversation worded like absolutely no Croatian couple would ever have, basically Croatian names pasted on the worst American actors from a Hallmark movie.

That Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins, was that the sequel to Life After Life, the one where she kept going back to the beginning and starting again with something different but equally far fetched and horrific happening to the girl? It was quite an interesting idea for a way to tell a story, but I found endlessly distressing and ultimately underwhelming.

Also that Eleanor Oliphant one everyone was raving about a few years ago. I liked the Eleanor character but I hated the melodramatic unravel, didn't buy that at all. Why couldn't she just be weird without there having to be a tragic disturbing secret?

The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken. A boy builds a model garden from a cereal packet, which comes to life and grows to full size, and in this garden he meets a princess, and plans to bring along his music teacher to meet the princess… and the ending is heartbreaking. Apparently, lots of readers complained at the time, and begged for a happier ending,

One of the Famous Five books has a really lazy ending, in which the children write home to tell their parents of the exciting happenings on their trip, and they receive a telegram from their parents ordering them to come home at once, because these things sound dangerous. Dreadful ending.’ I bet they never told their parents anything after that.

The “nineteen years later” epilogue of Harry Potter: I know it sets the scene for the stage play, but I liked the proper ending before that, and think the rest should have been left to the imagination.

My sister's keeper. I was so let down by the cop out ending of that.

Totally agree!! So annoying and ruined the book entirely (although it's not actually that good anyway).

100% agree. Such a long, dull book and very unsatisfying end. The only reason I persevered was because I was stuck on a bus for 8 hours with literally nothing else to do.

I came on to say exactly the same thing! Pointless, depressing, horrible ending.

I came on to say Long Island! It's like the author suddenly thought "aah fuck it, I don't like any of the characters anyway!"

(Contains spoilers)
The Food of Live - Amanda Prowse - you follow the story of how a family battle with anorexia in the family. Then, suddenly, the end, there’s a ‘happily ever after’ scene, but there’s a gap between the teen being ill and cured.

All John Wyndham books. Great all the way through but the endings suck.

I agree. A great book where I became deeply- invested and then this very upsetting ending

There was also the happy ending given to the 1990 film of The Witches, which angered Roald Dahl so much that he stood outside cinemas (in his dying year) with a megaphone, telling people not to see it.

He was a cantankerous git all his life. When you sign over film rights for something for a nice chunk of cash, unless you insert specific stipulations, screenplay writers/producers are perfectly within their rights to change things they don’t think will work. And frankly, I can see why test audiences unfamiliar with the novel might have thought an ending that involves a transformed boy condemned to a short life as a mouse (but that’s ok, because his grandmother is likely to die around the same time he will) was a bit grim.

I like her too but was disappointed by the end of 'Shrines of Gaiety' where the story was so lively but the end felt very pedestrian.

Picnic at Hanging Rock. I read it about 40 years ago and was gripped all the way through- until the ending, which was an utter let down.