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  • The Only Story

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Julian Barnes
  • Narrated by: Guy Mott
  • Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (17 ratings)

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The Only Story

Written by: Julian Barnes
Narrated by: Guy Mott
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Publisher's Summary

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of An Ending, a novel about a young man on the cusp of adulthood and a woman who has long been there, a love story shot through with sheer beauty, profound sadness, and deep truth.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

One summer in the 60s, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged 19, and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. In the mixed-doubles tournament he's partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who's 48, confident, ironic, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is also a warm companion, their bond immediate. And they soon, inevitably, are lovers. Clinging to each other as though their lives depend on it, they then set up house in London to escape his parents and the abusive Mr. Mcleod.

Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed her from a sterile marriage, and how - gradually, relentlessly - everything fell apart, as she succumbed to depression and worse while he struggled to understand the intricacy and depth of the human heart. It's a piercing account of helpless devotion, and of how memory can confound us and fail us and surprise us (sometimes all at once), of how, as Paul puts it, "first love fixes a life forever."

©2018 Julian Barnes (P)2018 W. F. Howes

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Bad Choice !

I did not get beyond Chapter 2! A disappointing
choice. Wish I'd read reviews on line first!

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SW

The first half of the book was too long....in that the repetition of ' but I was only 19' dragged. I would have finished there but I was reading for book club. Glad I continued, the portrayal of Susan's alcoholism was perfect. Although sad this character flaw made the book.

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