---
product_id: 61631919
title: "The Only Story: A novel Hardcover – April 17, 2018"
brand: "julian barnes"
price: "$20.63"
currency: USD
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 10
url: https://www.desertcart.us/products/61631919-the-only-story-a-novel-hardcover-april-17-2018
store_origin: US
region: United States of America
---

# The Only Story: A novel Hardcover – April 17, 2018

**Brand:** julian barnes
**Price:** $20.63
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** The Only Story: A novel Hardcover – April 17, 2018 by julian barnes
- **How much does it cost?** $20.63 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.us](https://www.desertcart.us/products/61631919-the-only-story-a-novel-hardcover-april-17-2018)

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- julian barnes enthusiasts

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## Description

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    The Only Story isn't much of a story
  

*by E***E on Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2018*

Every now and then I come across a novel that I wish had been written by someone else--and this is one of those novels. Barnes is a wonderful writer who deserves the Man Booker, but this novel--in the guise of a reflective memoir--depends much too much on telling and not enough on showing, as they like to say in the workshops. It’s the early 1960’s in a suburb of London where a 19  year old middle-class college student and a 48 year old married woman meet at the local tennis club, fall in love and eventually live together for some ten years--that’s the fictional premise, but the characters are uninteresting, the story  banal, and there’s so little dramatization of events that it felt more like reading a long sententious essay with some pretty phrases about love and life than a novel about real flesh and blood people. The only character who comes across as vivid and dynamic is, oddly, the novel’s villain--the woman’s boozed-up and abusive husband. After I finished--it is Julian Barnes, after all--I began to picture what this “love story” would have been like in the hands of John Updike, Philip Roth, or William Trevor.  I can’t imagine that they would leave us with such shadowy and thinly-drawn lovers; instead, they would have dramatized the deterioration of such a lopsided relationship without copping out and resorting to the woman’s sudden emergence as a dysfunctional alcoholic? Her new-found alcoholism was unconvincing and struck me as merely a convenient  way for Barnes to evade the hard work of dramatizing  the inevitable conflicts and collapse of a love affair that--as anyone could tell--had little chance of surviving. It’s disappointing that The Only Story isn’t more of a story.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    What Story Do You Choose to Tell Yourself?
  

*by J***S on Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2018*

"Most of us have only only 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."Like much of Julian Barnes' work, this novel is deceptively brief, yet so fully developed in its "prehistory" (a word the narrator likes, and which takes on overtones alternately ominous, tiresome, and clinical, depending on context) that it exists as its own three-dimensional organism, which is not, alas, reassuringly self-contained, but which instead sends probing tendrils into every hairline crack of the reader's consciousness; the results are similar to ivy on a brick wall--depending on your structure, this book will either cause you to crumble, or you'll assimilate it, and it will change color with the seasons, and perhaps even bond with its host, creating greater stability.You may make of this comparison what you will, but the fact remains that this is a wildly unsettling, deeply necessary, shockingly perceptive book. It has a plot, yes, but that plot is as irrelevant to the reality of the novel as a person's face is irrelevant to the truth of the soul. And so it hardly matters what the book is about--despite the repeated assertion that there is one story in each life, and this is the narrator's.And yet, the assertion leads the reader to examine what the point is of storytelling. Why do we choose the stories we choose? What purpose do they serve? If you were to meet a complete stranger and you had to give that person a thirty-second honest precis that would reveal who you are, what would you say? When you start to think about this question, you realize that story lends credibility to truth. If you told the truth about yourself to a stranger, they wouldn't believe you. If you told the truth about yourself to someone who knows you, chances are they'd believe you even less.So that is what story does--it clothes and animates truth, or some version of the truth, so that people can see it, which allows them to come closer to believing it. But of course, every truth has a vast wardrobe of stories it can wear, and even if you're telling only one story, you'll never tell it the same way twice."The Only Story" is, among other things, an examination of how we choose to inhabit the story we choose to tell. It's an examination of how the ways in which the story is told can change the story; even how shifting the lens of the camera from first person to second to third radically changes perception of the same events. And thus, it leads the reader to consider how outcomes can shift depending on how a story is told.You can read this book as the world's most depressing love story. You can read it as a cautionary tale about emotional and psychological maturity. You can read it as a warning about the ways in which people are inevitably trapped by circumstance. You can just sit and inhale the scent of the scorched earth after the full impact of it hits you.Or you can take from it the idea that story is what the storyteller makes of it, and remind yourself that "Little Red Riding Hood" may well be the tale of a werewolf-hunter, rather than a story about a basket of treats and a dark wood.What's your defining story? How do you plan to tell it to yourself? Because really, you're the audience who matters.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    OK, BUT NOT UP TO BARNES' HIGH STANDARDS
  

*by J***N on Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2018*

I never thought I'd give any Julian Barnes book less than five stars, but this item's caliber is not as high as EVERY other Barnes writing miracle I have enjoyed.  In relationship to his other works, this somewhat interesting, but, otherwise, almost story, just doesn't live up to Mr. Barnes usual witting, somewhat biting works.  In spite of all that, various quirky characters' remarkss within the book and its final two sentences  saved it.  I'm looking for more like "The Sense of an Ending", "The Noise of Time", "Flaubert's Parrot" (his masterpiece), "Pulse" (embracing all sorts of quirky circumstances), "The Lemon Table" (loved it) and the brilliance of entertainment in his brief "Levels of Life" (either enhanced or destroyed Sarah Bernhardt's reputation for many) and "Love, etc." (the reader becomes a part of it).  In spite of, or because of all this, I'll still purchase the next Julian Barnes endeavor!!!

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*Product available on Desertcart United States of America*
*Store origin: US*
*Last updated: 2026-03-03*