I usually love Julian Barnes books, from the quirkiness of Flaubert's Parrot to the historical Arthur and George or the more modern exploration of jealousy in Before She Met Me. However, I don't think this book quite meets the high standards I've come to expect from Barnes.

I don't think it's possible to argue that this is badly written - it has all of Barnes' hallmark intelligent and poignant touches, but it just left me a bit cold. I think the issue for me is the writer's choice to use an unreliable narrator, an older man reflecting on his past relationship with a significantly older woman. The narrator claims to have forgotten many things and the historical detail is also lacking, so I found it really hard to imagine the events of the novel or believe in the intensity of the relationship.

A good book, but not a great one and certainly not among the best of what Barnes can produce. Better than 3 stars, but not really 4.

Another Julian Barnes that I couldn't put down. I find his writing and storytelling all that appeals to me as a reader. This one is deeply moving and so sad. One of the best UK novelists writing at the present time.

Julian Barnes has a lot of ardent fans, but I'm not one of them. Yes, some of his books have been terrific reads and worthy of their stature in contemporary fiction but I can't honestly say this is of the same calibre as Arthur & George or A History of the World... I had high hopes, but was ultimately underwhelmed.

The love story just didn't work for me. I didn't feel the emotion, or care about the characters. It wouldn't stand out at all to me, apart from the author. Which makes it a hit, regardless!

It's a well-written story, but a thoroughly depressing one that I couldn't wait to end.

Already a big fan of Julian Barnes ever since History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters - so i was very excited to see a new release. So i was slightly worried i had very high expectations........but wow i was not disappointed! You experience the growing maturity and relationship of Paul and Susan, as Paul looks back on his relationship with the much older Susan. The meeting, the early lust and what becomes a deeper love and the challenges throughout their relationship. So without giving more away, a great read and definitely will be purchasing a few copies of this to share with friends.......enjoy!

Thank you to Netgallery for providing an ARC to provide this review, have purchased several since

An old man reminisces about the great love affair of his life, his affair with a woman 30 years older than himself whom he met and ran away with when he was just 19 and she 48, married and with two daughters older than Paul himself. It was never going to turn out well, and of course it doesn’t. But for Paul it remains “the only story” and he shares it with the reader in exhaustive and ultimately repetitious and tedious detail. This is a solipsistic novel that assumes the reader is as interested in Paul’s great love affair as he is. He muses and reflects and as Susan herself points out “You know, Paul…sometimes I’m really disappointed in you…you keep coming up with these banal comments and banal questions.” And that’s the problem for me of this book – it’s a banal story that aspires to be something greater. But Paul, and by implication Barnes, isn’t up to it. He’s a cold fish. He stays with Susan while she self-destructs but it’s never clear why he does so. There doesn’t seem to be any passion, or even love, involved. In fact it’s never clear what the attraction is in the first place. And more importantly we never hear from Susan herself and it’s even less clear what she sees in Paul. Her marriage isn’t satisfactory but why she should throw everything up for a callow young man seems inexplicable. There’s a hint of misogyny here as well. It’s implied that if only Susan had been better able to cope then it would all have been fine, thus letting Paul off the hook. I felt uncomfortable all the way through this novel, which seems to me to be attempting to be profounder than it actually is. In essence it’s a pretty sordid tale hedged around with cliché and platitude, and ultimately it fails to convince.

Another wonderful novel from Julian Barnes, about love, life, time and memory. I couldn't get enough - it's the kind of book you want to devour in one go. And what an amazing cover!

Sometimes the most impressive writing is the kind that sneaks up on you. Julian Barnes is undoubtedly a great writer with a keen eye for delicacies of character and an even keener eye for a finely-tuned sentence.. The premise of failed forbidden love (here a teenage boy, older married woman, the pressure to conform) and the narrative style (first-person navel-gazing that passes close to narcissism) plus the themes of suburbanism, unfulfillment are familiar to readers of his work but even at the start when The Only Story seemed to be treading over old ground rather than breaking new it was still a pleasure to read. The story of Paul and Susan meeting at the local tennis club where Paul is told that his lack of defined political stance automatically makes him a Conservative (with and sigh of relief from full members) and falling in love is dryly funny, gentle and engaging but not earth-shattering.
In the second part the novel and the writing suddenly emerge as something quite transcendent. The second-person voice is almost impossible to do well, not least because there rarely seems to be a reason based on the reader; too often it [comes across] as a decision based on the author’s own desire to “do something different“. At first I thought Barnes had fallen into this trap, I may even have rolled my eyes a little at the sudden shift but as Paul and Susan’s story transforms from a typical story of suburbanite adultery into a heart-wrenching rendition of Susan’s decline into alcoholism and the slow disintegration of their relationship the second-voice comes into its own in a way I don’t think I have ever experienced before. The ruminative, detached tone of the first part turns from self-absorption into a painful mixture of self-reproach and self-preservation and Paul’s asides to the reader become demands, accusations against himself. The second-person wounds deeply and the sense of pain, of helplessness and of anger that it creates is devastating. When talking about love and leaving Susan’s friend Joan tells Paul

“You’re still in it. You’ll always be in it…not literally [but] in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it’s gone that deep. You’ll always be walking wounded. That’s the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don’t you agree?"

She could just as easily be talking to Barnes’s readers who will be walking wounded long after finishing this piercing story.

I was very interested in the premise of the love story between the younger man and the older woman, as I thought it would be an interesting exploration of taboo, feeling and the transcending of social norms.

Sadly, the book was a dense ramble through the thoughts of a self-indulgent point of view character, with barely any action taking place on the page - much of the novel is description or second-hand relating of incidents through a thick veil of 'I'm an unreliable narrator, don't you know, and my memory is fallible'.

Every single page is a violation of the traditional 'show, don't tell' rule of fiction. I understand that a well-written book and a talented author can break fictional traditions when done well, but this was not one of those times. It resulted in a boring novel which managed to render an entire character's life dull and meaningless., when it was probably quite an eventful storyline underneath the thick stylising

I'm sure there are very intellectual undertones and meaningful reasons why Barnes made the stylistic decisions he did in writing this book, but if that's the case I didn't pick up on those reasons. For example, the narrative voice shifts from first person through second person and third person even through the point of view character is consistent throughout - and I couldn't fathom why this was the case. It didn't seem to have a meaningful reason except that Barnes wanted to show what a good writer he is.

On a sentence-by-sentence basis the book is well-written, but as a whole I didn't enjoy it at all. At a certain point near the end, the narrator talks about someone being 'bullied by reputation, truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported', and that's how I feel about books, but not this one: a book should stand alone, aside from its author's fame and renown as a good writer. Yet this one, sadly, does not.

Julian Barnes's latest novel sets out its agenda from its very first paragraph:

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

And then, soon after we are told:

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives... But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

But here's the first problem. If this is your only story, then it's the one you have most often told and retold even if - as is the case here - mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away?

The first pages of the book, then, hold the seed of the whole novel. First of all, this will be a love story or, if that sounds too sentimental , the history of a relationship. And it's an unusual one, since it features a young man not yet out of his teens who falls in love with a woman nearly three decades older than him. And married with children older than himself. It's the type of affair which even in our liberal times might raise an eyebrow or two, let alone in a conservative London suburb in the sixties. Secondly, this is a novel about memory. Because stories, including (or particularly?) love stories, are shaped by their protagonists and their narrators. And memory and truth are often uncomfortable bedfellows.

Love, memory, truth. Novelistic but hardly novel themes. Indeed, they are subjects which have been tackled by countless authors, not least by Barnes himself in earlier works of his. In this respect, I found this book disappointing, especially coming as it does hot on the heels of The Noise of Time, which I had enjoyed immensely. The age-gap between protagonists Paul and Susan does give this story its particular dynamic but, other than that, the plot is not particularly distinctive.

On the other hand, from a seasoned novelist such as Barnes one can expect a well-crafted work. In this respect, "The Only Story" does not disappoint. Like The Noise of Time, the novel is cast in three parts. In the first section, Paul, now nearing his seventies, recalls the earliest years of his relationship with Susan. The novelty of the relationship, the sense of transgression, that youthful feeling that love will surmount all difficulties are palpable, even if there are spoilers implying that many illusions will be shattered.

In the second part, Paul takes us through the challenging, later years of his relationship with Susan. Interestingly, these darker recollections make him reassess the beginning of his story with Susan and we start to realise that the first part might have recounted through rose-tinted glasses. As the memories become more painful, Paul's narrative moves almost imperceptibly to the second person. Second-person narrative is always hard to pull off, but Barnes manages it nicely.

The third part has a valedictory quality as we are brought up to speed with the intervening decades. The narrative is now in the third-person, although the point of view remains firmly that of Paul, who now philosophizes and ruminates about what life has taught him about love.

It's an effectively structured novel whose artifice is ably hidden behind a likeable, but unreliable, bumbling narrator, who recounts his story in leaps and bounds, dropping spoilers and repeating himself. There are also other effective touches, such as the evocation of the social and historical context of the story.

It is, in other words, a not-particularly-distinctive story, told in an accomplished way.

I thought The Only Story was excellent in some parts but that it lost its way a little. It is, of course, beautifully written throughout with some very poignant observations but struggled to carry the story through to its end.

The story begins with a nineteen-year-old Paul in the mid-1960s in a "respectable" Surrey village, who falls for and eventually begins an affair with an older, married woman whom he meets at the Tennis Club. Julian Barnes uses this as a device to reflect on youth and its lack of care for consequences, on love and on the progress of lives, including the slowly growing crises that may overwhelm them.

For much of its length I found it excellent. Barnes is insightful and slightly resignedly compassionate to his characters, who all seem exceptionally real and well-drawn to me. His prose is wonderful; elegant, poised, sometimes very witty and very easy to read. The narrative is partly in Paul's first-person voice which I thought caught the mind of a middle-class nineteen-year-old at that time beautifully. I highlighted a lot of examples, like this, for example: "I was keen in those days to find hidden motives – preferably involving hypocrisy – behind the obvious ones." Period is perfectly painted in attitudes, language and the general background. He is very good on memory – the idiotic details we do remember and the important things we don't, and it's unreliability. He sums it up well in the phrase, "But I'm remembering the past, not reconstructing it."

The final third of the novel is in the third person (but jumps to first person briefly, which I found simply annoying) and although it's thoughtful and intelligent, it read to me less like the conclusion to a novel and rather more like an essay on the way a life can begin with real passion and ideals and then be lived at a slightly sad, reserved level. For two-thirds of the book I was very involved with the story of Paul and Susan, but the long, rather bleak and melancholy conclusion didn't work quite so well. It is full of truth and insight – but perhaps not really a story.

Despite this reservation, The Only Story is beautifully written and has lots of real insight I can still recommend it warmly.

(My thanks to Jonathan Cape/Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

.“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. You may point out –correctly –that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.”.

Thus begins the latest novel by one of my favorite authors, Julian Barnes. I immediately knew, just by reading those words that I will be witness to a beautiful and heartbreaking love story which will leave me, after the last page, fulfilled by the exquisite writing but also spent from suffering along with the characters. I was entirely right.

.“Most of us have only one story (…) that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.”.

The Author tells the story of Paul, a young man of 19 and his first love, Susan, a middle age married woman of 48. They meet in 1963 on the tennis court, where fate brought them together for a double match. They begin to spend more and more time together until they fall irremediably in love.

The novel is divided in three parts, the first chapter is written in first person and relates the beginning of the love story. The second part is a mixture of 1st and 2nd person and deals with the inevitable degradation and end love while the 3rd part, where we showed Paul’s remaining life, is written mostly in a detached 3rd person.

The authors explain his choices to use these narration techniques better than I could. .“And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realize that there are other persons, and other tenses. ”.
“But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed. “

I thought that the change between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person narration to be of powerful effect and it worked very well to confer the intended atmosphere and tension. It was particularly compelling in the 2nd chapter which started in 1st person and moved to 2nd person when the relationship started to face problems and Susan changed. 2nd person is somewhat in between the personal 1st person and the 3rd, which suggests an intermediary state, where Paul’s efforts/failure to save Susan and their love transitions from the intense love and suffering to a more detached form.

If you read The Sense of An Ending, you get to immediately see the similarity between The Only Story and the 2011 Booker winner. They both deal with the unreliability of memory. If in The Sense of An Ending the theme is subtly introduced and we are left to discover it ourselves while reading, here it is expressed, out in the open through narrator’s words.

“But here’s the first problem. If this is your only story, then it’s the one you have most often told and retold, even if –as is the case here –mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away?”
“He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.”
“So, that familiar question of memory. He recognized that memory was unreliable and biased, but in which direction? Towards optimism? That made initial sense. You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph –his own had hardly been that –but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful. Purposeful? That would be pitching it a bit high. Still, an optimistic memory might make it easier to part from life, might soften the pain of extinction. But you could equally argue the opposite. If memory is biased towards pessimism, if, retrospectively, all appears blacker and bleaker than it actually was, then this might make life easier to leave behind.”

I don’t know if the similarities were intentional or if there was laziness in finding new ideas. However, both novels are amazing and in the same time similar and different, both worth reading and living.

The Only Story is a story about and powerful love sorted to fail, about hope, shame, unspoken guilt and loss. It is a beautifully written novel, as everything Barnes writes and I consider myself lucky to have been able to read this novel before it was published.

I think I came at this, the latest novel from one of my favourite authors, Julian Barnes, from the wrong direction. No one who knows me will be the slightest bit surprised to hear that I latched on to the word ‘story’ in the title and assumed that the key element here would be a tying of the concept of story to the way in which we live our lives. And, to a certain extent that is a concern addressed by the narrative that Barnes relates. However, when Barnes talks of the ‘only’ story what he is specifically referring to is a love story.

Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn’t make it any less real... Everyone does. It’s the only story.
The love story that Barnes goes on to relate is that of Paul and Susan, a couple who meet during one 1960s summer when nineteen year old Paul, home from university, decides to kill some time at the local tennis club. He is paired with Susan for a mixed doubles tournament and the friendship that develops between them quite quickly blossoms into a much more serious relationship. However, to Paul’s nineteen Susan is forty-six and married with two adult daughters. The much older Paul, who narrates this story, recognises that to the reader this might seem problematic, even an error of judgment (the tennis club committee, which blackballs them both, clearly has even stronger feelings about the matter) but asks for a more sensitive understanding of the situation.

Perhaps you understood a little too quickly; I can hardly blame you. We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a pre-existing category. We see what is general or common about it; where as the participants see - feel - only what is individual and particular to them. We say: how predictable; they say: what a surprise!
Well, however we may categorise Paul and Susan’s relationship, it not only continues, it absolutely thrives, even under the grumpy and sometimes violent auspices of Susan’s sexually estranged husband and eventually, Paul having completed his university course, they move into their own property as he begins his training to become a solicitor. But, while Paul is content with the situation, Susan begins to show signs of strain. Her health, both physical and mental, starts to crumble and Paul is forced to question how wise, how stable, their relationship is. He is even forced to question its very foundation - the love which he believes to be the basis of everything else.

The older Paul who narrates the story would, I am sure, maintain that his love never falters, but it certainly changes and one aspect in particular that changes is the way in which he positions himself in relation to his actions as he retells his ‘only story’. At one point he asks

do all these retelling bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away.
In narrative terms he certainly distances himself further from the story of his and Susan’s relationship the further he moves from that initial attraction. Thus, the story is split into three sections. The first tells of those early years and the narrative choices reflect Paul’s observation that

first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense:
the narrative voice and tense of that initial section echo that. The older Paul, however, is astute enough to recognise that it takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses and as the relationship begins to alter so, in the telling of the second and third sections, he distances himself further and further away from the both the action and from Susan, moving through a well controlled second tense in the middle of the text and then into third person, past tense in the final part until, as an elderly man, he can reflect on their time together from the distance of a limited third person narrator, who is well aware that in his recall of their relationship he may also be an unreliable narrator.

There has been much discussion in the press as to the merits of this novel, in particular in comparison to his award winning The Sense of an Ending. I thought that that was a magnificent work and while I find much in this new book to admire, it didn’t affect me in the same way as the earlier novel. In part this may be because I didn’t agree with his basic premise. If we do each only have one story to tell (and this is a proposition that Elizabeth Strout also puts forward in My Name is Lucy Barton) then I don’t think it is always a love story. My primary story would be about me as a teacher because teaching pretty much defines who I always have been and who I still am. Teaching is as natural an activity to me as breathing is to most other people. The Only Story feels to me like a very personal response on the part of the author, possibly growing out of his own experience. Nevertheless, it is an extremely well crafted novel with many of those beautifully turned phrases and astutely authentic observations which are the hallmark of Barnes’ style as, for example, when he speaks of an English silence - one in which all the unspoken words of perfectly understood by both parties. So, while for me, this may not be quite his best work, it is still Barnes writing at the top of his game and I very strongly recommend it.

This is the second novel I have read in as many weeks featuring a romance between a very young man and a much older woman. Notable in both is the use of unusual second person narration. In this case the narration switches between the first, second and third person voices and a very effective technique it is too. We see the relationship between Paul and Susan in its heyday (the first person, living for the moment, not thinking too deeply), passing through disillusionment (the second person, conveying accusation or apology) to nostalgic reflection in the third person a couple of decades later.

‘Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.’

I found much to admire in the author’s discussion of memory. ‘Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first.’

Very interesting insights, too, into relationships and how they change over time and circumstances. I had a problem, though, believing in this particular love affair and didn’t much like the two main characters themselves, perhaps we’re not meant to. The character I could best engage with is Joan - an intriguing back story and some sparkling dialogue. I found myself sympathising with the loathsome Gordon towards the end and I think that is the author’s intention. By the time we get to the end Paul realises (as I think we do from the beginning) that he was overwhelmingly attracted by the transgressive nature of the May-December relationship and then sticking with it however unappealing it became. He must love more deeply than others, just look at the obstacles he has in his way. His later musings of the ‘what if?’ kind and his realisation that Susan’s rather irritating ‘couple’ banter was not entirely exclusive to him struck me particularly.

Plenty to think about here and plenty to recommend.

A superlative use of language and grammar. A gripping tale of love and loss, but unlike anything you've read on the subject before. Barnes finds yet another way brake our hearts.

As ever with Julian Barnes it's hard not to be swept along by the narrative, nod along with the shrewd observations of the human heart and appreciate how the characters are fully drawn and intriguing - particularly Susan, whose mysteries and vagaries genuinely drive the intrigue forward.

An easy read, funny in many places and a good stab at the supercilious nonsense of the suburban English middle class.

I'm not really sure what I was expecting from this novel. I have read Julian Barnes in the past and had mixed feelings about his work. I think I was expecting some high minded, literary stuff that would win prizes but not necessarily engage me. It wasn't like that at all. This is a tale of first love, young love, dysfunctional love, the love that shapes a person's life ever after for better or worse. It's wistful and melancholy, very evocative of a bygone era. Written from the perspective of a man at the end of his life, musing over the love story that started his adult life. It's full of problems, dysfunction, oddly distasteful elements which work to create a kind of beauty in the midst of what is clearly quite horrible for large periods of time. I was particularly taken by the author's writing about what it is to live with someone who is an alcoholic and how that can test and distort love. I have experience of this, and it rings very true for me. I found the book intriguing, I never really imagined where it would end up.

Julian Barnes is a great writer, a perceptive one, who sees beyond the surface of the characters he is writing and life's dilemmas and ambiguities. In The Only Story he writes about love, memory and perspective with elegance.

At the centre of the novel is Paul, 19 year old boy who begins an affair with a 48 year old woman he meets at his local tennis club. The novel follows the gradual unravelling of this relationship over the course of ten years, and the subsequent impact on the narrator and those around the couple.

Barnes' writing is clever: as he meditates on our use and misuse of memory, the novel jolts about in time - from the past to the present to the future, just as the mind makes seemingly arbitary connections between our memories.

Despite Barnes' intelligence, at times I felt that the book felt a little too self-consciously analytical. I enjoyed the way the characters meditate on what it is to love, but at times this felt over-laboured.

An enjoyable and intelligent read.

I blow hot and cold with novels by Julian Barnes. I just loved 'Arthur & George', but was left dulled by 'The Sense of an Ending' and 'The Noise of Time'. But I wanted to give him another chance (aren't I kind!), so tried this one. I loved it - well, most of it. The book is split into 3 parts, and I think Part 3 could have been edited much more thoroughly. There was much repetition, and I was a little bored, but not enough to put me off the book.

The story is set in the 1960s in Surrey. Paul Casey is a 19 year-old student who is told by his parents to join the local tennis club. There he meets Susan Macleod, 48, married, mother of 2 children the same age as Paul. They fall madly in love and start an affair. Part one of the book is narrated by Paul as an older man, looking back at the start of the affair, and describing their feelings, and the reactions of those around them. Part two recounts their running away and starting a new life together, but the slow breakdown of their relationship as Susan becomes depressed, turns to alcohol, and starts to lose her mind. Part three is set in the present day with Paul describing his feelings now, and whether he feels guilt about what happened to Susan.

It's such an emotional read. It shows that love can jump out at anyone at anytime, and how strongly it can affect us. But also when it goes wrong, it affects us just as strongly - we can be scarred for life. There is so much of life that Paul/Julian is commenting on, you start to question whether he is right. What is the meaning of love? There is one thing for sure though - your first love stays with you for the rest of your life.