Julian Barnes

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 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. First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn’t know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he’s proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen. Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of Britain's greatest mappers of the human heart.

The Only Story

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 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. First love has lifelong consequences, but Paul doesn't know anything about that at nineteen. At nineteen, he's proud of the fact his relationship flies in the face of social convention. As he grows older, the demands placed on Paul by love become far greater than he could possibly have foreseen. Tender and wise, The Only Story is a deeply moving novel by one of fiction's greatest mappers of the human heart.

Shameera Nair Lin

I was not initially impressed, but the protagonist grew on me eventually. There are some fascinating observations on the nature of love in this, most of which are worth considering.

Nadine 

You just know this never could work out and then watch everything fall apart

Moray Lyle McIntosh

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.

The Only Story

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