The Only Story

The Only Story is a 2018 novel by British author Julian Barnes. Set in Surrey, England, the novel begins in the early 1960s, when nineteen-year-old student Paul Roberts meets Susan Macleod, the forty-eight-year-old wife of a violent alcoholic. The two begin a passionate love affair, which ends when Susan develops an alcohol dependency of her own and declines into dementia. The Only Story is the thirteenth novel by Barnes, a much-decorated author who won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending.

The story opens in a leafy town situated among the well-to-do suburbs south of London. It is the 1960s, and references to contemporary political events set the scene: the up-and-coming baby boomer generation is beginning to shunt aside the rigid class order and deferential manners of the older generation. Paul Roberts is nineteen, an undergraduate at Sussex University, returning to his parents’ home for the summer. Paul has learned to look down on the comfortable suburban conformity of his parents and their neighbors: the last thing he wants is a “tennis wife.”

Nevertheless, starved of social contact, Paul joins the local tennis club and signs up for mixed doubles. He is paired with forty-eight-year-old Susan Macleod, attractive but shy, troubled, and married. Paul quickly becomes infatuated with her and they begin a sexual relationship. Paul learns that Susan has not had sex with her husband, Gordon, in two decades. He is abusive, pushing her face into a doorframe in a drunken rage. Paul meets him, and although he is outwardly civil to Gordon, he despises the older man intensely. Paul meets their children, Martha and Clara (whom he refers to as “Miss G” and “Miss N. G.” for “Miss Grumpy” and “Miss Not-So-Grumpy).



Paul is also introduced to Susan’s former tennis partner, Joan, another housewife of the leafy suburbs. Joan is hard-drinking and cynical, admitting that her ambitions have shrunk to nothing more than finding cheaper bottles of gin, but Paul takes a liking to her.

Paul and Susan pursue their relationship in secret, while Paul’s infatuation grows. When their affair is discovered, they are expelled from the tennis club. Paul’s parents are outraged. He returns to university, but Susan has become the center of his life. Their relationship undermines his studies and his social life, but although Paul realizes that his love for Susan is taking a toll on his life, perhaps changing its course forever, he cannot relinquish her.

When Paul graduates, Susan leaves Gordon, and the couple moves together to London, where Susan buys them a house. Paul leaves his disapproving parents a note.



Paul begins studying law. He wants Susan to divorce Gordon legally, but she is unwilling to discuss his abuse of her in court—more fundamentally, she is unwilling to think about the many years she allowed herself to live in fear of her husband.

Paul notices that Susan is drinking a lot, more than before. He tries to curb her drinking but it worsens, gradually developing into full-blown alcoholism. When Paul tries to help her, she either relapses or keeps drinking and tries (unsuccessfully) to hide it from him.

As the drinking gets worse, it causes Susan to suffer dementia-like symptoms of paranoia, mood swings, and forgetfulness. Paul takes her to a psychiatrist and then checks her into a clinic, but neither intervention halts Susan’s decline. Soon she is delusional and unable to care for herself.



Paul moves out of their house. A friend of theirs takes care of Susan. Paul dates Anna, a woman of his own age, but the relationship never satisfies Paul. He moves back in with Susan and takes on the work of caring for her. After some years, Susan’s daughter Martha agrees to take over Susan’s care.

Forced to abandon law, Paul has become an office manager. He never has another serious relationship or children. He eventually settles in a rural village, where he runs the “Frogworth Valley Artisanal Cheese Company” and bakes. Still enraged by the memory of Gordon, he distrusts and despises men.

Describing himself as an “absolutist for love,” Paul devotes himself to the memory of his relationship with Susan. Yet, gradually he forgets the body he once fetishized: “Things, once gone can’t be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can’t be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can’t be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn’t forget, because we have been changed forever.”



The Only Story explores themes of first love, loss, and self-delusion. It also paints a portrait of a generation—Barnes’s own—whose ideals have floundered over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The novel was generally well received by critics, who found it a “somber but well-conceived character study” (Kirkus Reviews).