The only story

The Resource The only story
Label
The only story
Statement of responsibility
Julian Barnes
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author ..., 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 sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged nineteen, 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 forty-eight, 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. Macleod. Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed Susan from a sterile marriage, and how--gradually, relentlessly--everything fell apart, as he found himself struggling 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.'"--Dust jacket
Cataloging source
DLC
Dewey number
823/.914
Index
no index present
LC call number
PR6052.A6657
LC item number
O55 2018
Literary form
fiction

Context

Context of The only story

Work of

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