ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE and FINANCIAL TIMES
From the bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes “a brilliant, rueful look at love—what we do for it, how we experience it and what makes it die” (People).
One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, nineteen-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he’s partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, witty, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers.
Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how—gradually, relentlessly—everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory—and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another. Poignant, vivid and profound, The Only Story is a searing novel of memory, devotion, and how first love fixes a life forever.
“Much of the pleasure in The Only Story comes from the wit and verbal precision that Barnes allows his narrator. … Barnes’s switch from voice to voice is at once understated and dazzling.”—The New York Review of Books
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Julian Barnes (f. 1946) er en af Englands mest anerkendte og respekterede forfattere i dag. Han har skrevet en lang række romaner, novelle- og essaysamlinger.
I 2012 modtog han Man Booker-prisen for romanen Når noget slutter (dansk 2013), som er blevet filmatiseret i 2017 med bl.a. Charlotte Rampling på rollelisten.
I 2018 udkom Den eneste historie. En roman om en ung mand på tærsklen til de voksnes verden og en kvinde, der har været der længe. Det er en kærlighedshistorie gennemsyret af ægte skønhed, dyb tristhed og bidende sandheder. En skarpsindig fortælling, der beskriver, hvordan vores erindringer kan forbløffe, svigte og overraske os; hvordan den allerførste forelskelse kan ende med at determinere et helt liv.
Ved Blixen Prisfesten 2015 blev Julian Barnes tildelt Zinklar-prisen på 100.000 kr. for novellesamlingen "Puls".
Foto: Alan Edwards
