{"product_id":"the-only-story-by-julian-barnes","title":"The Only Story by Julian Barnes","description":"\u003cp\u003eLike his Booker-winning\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Sense of an Ending\u003c\/i\u003e, Julian Barnes’s new novel is narrated by an older man looking back, in puzzlement, on his past, said Kate Clanchy in The Guardian. When the story opens – in 1960s Surrey – “Paul is 19, down from university, and bored and aimless”. His mother sends him off to the tennis club, where he embarks on an affair with a “knowing, ironical” 48-year-old named Susan. The relationship proves to be the “defining event” – indeed the “only story” – of Paul’s life: Susan leaves her husband and the couple set up home together. But as the years pass, their romance curdles – because of Susan’s creeping alcoholism. Marked by its “psychological acuity”, this is a quietly harrowing novel about the complexity of love and the slipperiness of memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003eTo a large extent,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Only Story\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003erepresents a “return to origins” for Barnes, said Jon Day in the Financial Times. We are “back in the suburbs of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eMetroland\u003c\/i\u003e” – the privet hedge-lined world of his 1980 debut. And Paul is the latest in a long line of protagonists “embarrassed” by the “bourgeois horrors” of family life. While it may not be especially original, this is still a “brilliant”, probing work. It’s certainly cleverly constructed and packed with “skilfully turned essays”, said David Sexton in the London Evening Standard. Yet it also displays – like so much of this author’s work – a remarkable disdain for the English middle classes and “no sympathy whatsoever for family”. Even as a love story, it struggles to be believable: it is “improbably pitched from the start”. “Not since Anita Brookner has such an accomplished novelist so skilfully put forward such a wrongful, damaging, view of life.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Week Bookshop","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53888912163179,"sku":"vad1789955789987","price":17.04,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0987\/5383\/9467\/files\/the-only-story-by-julian-barnes_1.jpg?v=1789955794","url":"https:\/\/cattrees.shop\/products\/the-only-story-by-julian-barnes","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}