The Only Story

A sensitive look at what makes lovers tick.

Robbie Millen, The Times

A tender and heartbreaking novel.

Alex Preston, Observer

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 novelist at the height of his powers ... Quietly devastating.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

This intense, taut, sad and often beautiful tale may well be Barnes’ best novel for years.

Lara Feigel, Spectator

Cunningly crafted and sharply observed.

Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail

Barnes gives us a novel that asks the profoundest questions about memory, love and human existence.

Lindsay MacPherson and Ben Felsenburg, Harrods Magazine

Immensely powerful.

Alex Clark, New Statesman

A gentle, bleak, and brilliant novel.

Jon Day, Financial Times

Exquisite.

Kate Clanchy, Guardian

Distils some of the pandemonium, and intergenerational conflict, of our own uncertain time.

Max Lin

A vivid dramatization of the narcissism of obsessive love.

Economist

A quietly harrowing novel about the complexity of love and the slipperiness of memory.

The Week

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

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

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

Barnes' knowing combination of humour and seriousness makes [The Only Story] ... a persuasive universal romance.

Lindsay Duguid, Tablet

An utterly devastating masterpiece of a novel.

Anne Cunningham, Irish Independent

A beautiful, tragic and poignant novel.

Huston Gilmore, Daily Express

Affecting.

Paddy Kehoe, RTE Online

A brave and expansive work, compellingly told.

Susan Byron, Catholic Herald

Tender, wise and beautifully written, this is sad and deeply moving stuff from Barnes. Highly recommended.

Olaf Tyaransen, Hot Press

In this year’s hottest new releases.

The Week **Best Books 2018**

A thoroughly rewarding book – a compassionate, touching and funny account… A profound book, it compels one to think about one’s own life.

Richard Hopton, Country & Town House

A brilliant, rueful look at love.

Tom Gliatto, People Magazine

As quiet and aching and intimate as a James Blake ballad.

Rupert Goold

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

Moving, funny, with ingenious emotional intelligence, it’s one to read and read again.

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday, **Books of the Year**

Barnes’s novel chronicles their romance with an austere tenderness

Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

[Barnes’s] facility for writing artfully conceived and executed novels about unfulfilled, disappointed lives has risen to almost unassailable heights.

Alastair Mabbott, Herald

Julian Barnes writes shockingly well about emotion… The Only Story is devastating and wonderful.

Victoria Hislop, Good Housekeeping

A solemn-ish meditation on the fallibility of memory… A love story – bitter and sweet in parts – unfurls.

Monocle