The Only Story

February 19, 2018
Barnes’s deeply touching novel is a study of heartbreak; like his Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending, it includes fading reminiscences, emotional complications, and moments of immeasurable sadness as an aging Englishman remembers his first and only love. Bored 19-year-old Paul meets 48-year-old Susan at the tennis club when they pair up for mixed doubles. She has a husband and two daughters older than Paul, but it is the 1960s, Paul’s first summer home from university, and he is impervious to social correctness, parental disapproval, or long-term consequences. Paul and Susan share a satiric view of their suburban surroundings that turns into a secret romance, then a not-so-secret affair. Together they move to London, where, over the next decade, Paul studies law and becomes a law office manager while Susan deteriorates into alcoholism and depression. Fifty years later, Paul looks back on the relationship in an account strewn with unanswerable questions and observations about the nature of love. As painful memories mount, Paul’s narration switches first
to second person and then builds more distance by settling into third person. By revisiting the flow and ebb of one man’s passion, Barnes eloquently illuminates the connection between an old man and his younger self. 75,000-copy announced first printing.

Starred review from March 1, 2018
In his newest mesmeric novel, Barnes, as in his Man Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of an Ending (2011), portrays an older man, Paul, looking back at his early life. The title refers to how we all have one love story we tell that defines our lives as well as to the old conception of the novel as a literary form that explores love. In this instance, Paul details how at 19, toward the end of the 1960s in leafy Surrey, just outside London, he fell in love with Susan McLeod, a 48-year-old married woman, at a tennis club. As Paul and Susan plunge ever-deeper into love, Barnes beautifully demonstrates that their romantic fantasy?and, by extension, the novel as a genre focused solely on love?struggles to survive in the face of violence, financial practicalities, and alcoholism. With a narrator every bit as intriguing as Stevens in Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), the novel slowly unfurls, and the reader drifts along on Barnes' gorgeous, undulating prose. Focusing on love, memory, nostalgia, and how contemporary Britain came to be, Barnes' latest will enrapture readers from beginning to end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2018

At age 19, Paul meets 48-year-old Susan Macleod at the local tennis club and the two begin an affair that lasts for more than a decade. Paul reflects on the heady, happy early years of the relationship and then delves into its darker passages and eventual disintegration, which haunts him throughout his life. The specificity of the circumstances and personalities of Paul and Susan make it clear that this is not an "older woman schools young man in love and sends him into the world" tale. Overall, it is a story about memory. Man Booker Prize winner Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) skillfully plays with narrative form, turning the novel into something of a metafiction without making it ponderous or difficult to read. While Paul is decidedly the narrator throughout, the point of view shifts depending on how much he wants to distance himself from the emotional pain. He begins in first person, then moves to second person in the grimmest period, then third person when reflecting on life after Susan, only returning to first person in the final pages. VERDICT Absorbing enough to polish off over a weekend, this novel has a place in popular and literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/17.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2018

A love affair between a 48-year-old and a 19-year-old is hardly unheard of, but Man Booker Prize winner Barnes reverses gender expectations, with home-from-university Paul falling for married mother Susan Mcleod when they're partnered together at a mixed doubles tournament at their south-of-London tennis club. First, they're lovers, then they're living together, combating irate family members on both sides. Decades later, with Susan dead, Paul contemplates all that went so well and all that finally went wrong.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2018
A May-September romance devolves into dysfunction and regret.Much like Barnes' 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, this one involves a man looking back at a youthful error in judgment and considering its consequences. Paul, the narrator, recalls being 19 and falling for 48-year-old Susan, who's in a loveless, sexless, and abusive marriage. Cocksure about their relationship in spite of others' judgments--Paul's parents and Susan's husband are righteously indignant, and the duo are kicked out of the tennis club where they began their affair--Paul decides to move in with Susan to pursue "exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove." The thrill of independence is short-lived, though, as Susan's nascent alcoholism intensifies; the first half of the book mentions Susan's drinking habit, but as if to mirror Paul's youthful ignorance, Barnes doesn't overtly signal how deep she's sunk until she's practically beyond help. Barnes also shifts the narrative voice across the novel to underscore Paul's callowness: The novel opens in first person, turns to second as if to shift blame upon the reader, then closes in a bereft, distant third. Barnes' characterizations of both Paul and Susan are detailed and robust, though given the narrative structure, Susan remains a bit of a cipher. What prompted her to drink? What kept her from pushing back against her husband? Most critically, what drew her to Paul? Paul, though, is mainly concerned with what made their romance distinct from the usual romantic cliches. In other words, he's narcissistic, and his rhetoric, in first person or not, often takes on a needy, pleading tone ("sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart"; "tough love is also tough on the lover.") But that's by Barnes' design, and it's consistently clear that Paul was in love, just tragically ill-equipped to manage it.A somber but well-conceived character study suffused with themes of loss and self-delusion.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.