Only Story, The

Description: **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.

Review: "A novelist at the height of his powers ... Quietly devastating." -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst * The Times * "Critics reckon it's Barnes's best novel for many years and roundly praised the `emotional acuity' of his writing." -- Laura Powell * Telegraph * "Exquisite." -- Kate Clanchy * Guardian * "Emotionally acute, profoundly beautiful, as droll as it is deep... this has to be one of the smartest novels that 2018 has to offer." -- Hephzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday * "A gentle, bleak, and brilliant novel." -- Jon Day * Financial Times * "Immensely powerful." -- Alex Clark * New Statesman * "This intense, taut, sad and often beautiful tale may well be Barnes' best novel for years." -- Lara Feigel * Spectator * "A tender and heartbreaking novel." -- Alex Preston * Observer * "As quiet and aching and intimate as a James Blake ballad." -- Rupert Goold "A sensitive look at what makes lovers tick." -- Robbie Millen * The Times * "A vivid dramatization of the narcissism of obsessive love." * Economist * "Cunningly crafted and sharply observed." -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail * "Barnes writes with shattering emotional acuity. The moments of pure devastation pile up, the story crushing with increasing weight as it unfurls." -- Lucy Scholes * Independent * "An utterly devastating masterpiece of a novel." -- Anne Cunningham * Irish Independent * "At once understated and dazzling. Which perhaps sums [Barnes] up, the dazzle lying not in the shimmer of individual sentences so much as in the curves and vaults of his structural decisions." -- Michael Gorra * New York Review of Books * "A quietly harrowing novel about the complexity of love and the slipperiness of memory." * The Week * "Distils some of the pandemonium, and intergenerational conflict, of our own uncertain time." -- Max Lin * i * "Barnes gives us a novel that asks the profoundest questions about memory, love and human existence." -- Lindsay MacPherson and Ben Felsenburg * Harrods Magazine * "What begins as a witty tale of rebellion against bourgeois norms becomes a moving meditation on love. Once again Barnes shows off his skill at getting to the heart of a human heart." -- Fanny Blake * Woman & Home * "Deeply affecting and profoundly philosophical, The Only Story is a novel by an author at the height of his technical powers." -- Charlotte Heathcote * Sunday Express *

Author Biography: Julian Barnes is the author of twelve novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and two books of non-fiction, Nothing to be Frightened Of and the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life. In 2017 he was awarded the Legion d'honneur.

The brilliant new novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending