The Only Story
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Guy Mott
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By:
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Julian Barnes
About this listen
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of An Ending, 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 60s, in a staid suburb south of London, Paul comes home from university, aged 19, 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 48, 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. Mcleod.
Decades later, with Susan now dead, Paul looks back at how they fell in love, how he freed her from a sterile marriage, and how - gradually, relentlessly - everything fell apart, as she succumbed to depression and worse while he struggled 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."
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"Opening in 1963, 19-year-old Paul (student, home from Uni) and 48-year-old Susan (married, mother of two) meet playing mixed doubles at the tennis club, and fall face-first in love. Promises are made instinctively and with little foresight, setting in motion the central conflict of Paul's life. Throughout the narrative, Barnes moves almost randomly between first, second, and third person, but narrator Guy Mott's deft transitions are so seamless that it's not immediately apparent to the listener. And this struck me as exactly how self-reflection works: you view yourself from every angle, and here this shifting vantage point creates the room in the narrative for moments of granular honesty, both beautiful and gruesome."
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Two unexpected tales written and read by the best-selling author of The Uncommon Reader, Untold Stories and The History Boys."The Greening of Mrs Donaldson" - Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to take in two lodgers, her mundane life becomes much more stimulating…
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A fun British story about unmentionable subjects!
- By Anonymous User on 11-05-12
By: Alan Bennett
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The Echo
- By: Minette Walters
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Minette Walters captivates mystery aficionados throughout the world with her evocative, multi-layered novels, which have been translated into 22 languages. In The Echo she spins a finely-wrought web of secrets and betrayals, love and guilt that entangles everyone who touches it. A homeless man has been found dead of starvation—huddled next to a food-filled freezer—in a London socialite’s garage.
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Cumbersome, dull and not worth the time
- By Celia on 04-08-14
By: Minette Walters
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44 Scotland Street
- By: Alexander McCall Smith
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The brilliant Alexander McCall Smith became an international sensation with his New York Times best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels. His award-winning wit, made famous through that series, is fully on display in 44 Scotland Street.
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Smith's answer to Maupin
- By Amazon Customer on 10-23-05
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Rumpole of the Bailey [Recorded Books]
- By: John Mortimer
- Narrated by: Patrick Tull
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first of six witty short stories, 60s-something English barrister, Horace Rumpole, takes on the younger generation both at home and in the hallowed courtroom—while offending his esteemed colleagues and his draconian wife, Hilda.
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great fun
- By Amazon Customer on 09-28-16
By: John Mortimer
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The End of the Affair
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Colin Firth
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Graham Greene’s evocative analysis of the love of self, the love of another, and the love of God is an English classic that has been translated for the stage, the screen, and even the opera house. Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, A Single Man) turns in an authentic and stirring performance for this distinguished audio release.
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Colin Firth Kills It
- By Em on 05-09-12
By: Graham Greene
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Maeve's Times
- In Her Own Words
- By: Maeve Binchy
- Narrated by: Kate Binchy
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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From the royal wedding to boring airplane companions, Samuel Beckett to Margaret Thatcher, "senior moments" to life as a waitress, Maeve's Times gives us wonderful insight into a changing Ireland as it celebrates the work of one of our best-loved writers in all its diversity - revealing her characteristic directness, laugh-out-loud humor, and unswerving gaze into the true heart of a matter.
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A GLIMPSE THROUGH MAEVE'S LOOKING GLASS
- By jstrfic on 08-08-17
By: Maeve Binchy
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The Brimstone Wedding
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is elegant, smart and in control. Only Jenny, her care assistant, knows that she harbours a painful secret, and only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny pieces together the answers to many questions that arise: Why has she kept possession of a house that her family don’t know about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy?
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Amazing reader elevates book to a higher level
- By Doggy Bird on 10-04-14
By: Barbara Vine
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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The Good Liar
- A Novel
- By: Nicholas Searle
- Narrated by: Matthew Brenher
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Veteran con artist Roy spots an obvious easy mark when he meets Betty, a wealthy widow, online. In no time at all, he's moved into Betty's lovely cottage and is preparing to accompany her on a romantic trip to Europe. Betty's grandson disapproves of their blossoming relationship, but Roy is sure this scheme will be a success. He knows what he's doing. As this remarkable feat of storytelling weaves together Roy's and Betty's futures, it also unwinds their pasts.
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Hope the movie is better than the book?
- By S. Smith on 10-17-19
By: Nicholas Searle
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Staying On
- By: Paul Scott
- Narrated by: Paul Shelley
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return ‘home’ when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pankot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire. Only the tyranny of their imposing landlady threatens to upset the quiet rhythm of their days.
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A Pleasant Meander
- By Ian C Robertson on 09-22-14
By: Paul Scott
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Pathetic narration makes this title unbearable
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Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour, and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.
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Disappointing
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Another masterpiece!
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
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A memoir on mortality as only Julian Barnes can write it, one that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.
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Brilliant
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Art belongs to everybody and nobody.
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Pathetic narration makes this title unbearable
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Strange and quirky story
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Disappointing
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Another masterpiece!
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Brilliant
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Barnes’ appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyperliterate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Lively yet discriminating in its enthusiasm, seemingly infinite in its range of reference, and written in prose as stylish as haute couture, Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy.
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Every love story is a potential grief story.
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The Narrative Gimmick Works
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With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor is regarded as one of the best writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in Last Stories, the master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered tales - nine of which have never been published in book form - that illuminate the human condition and will surely linger in the listener's mind. This final and special collection is a gift to lovers of literature and Trevor's many admirers, and affirms his place as one of the world's greatest storytellers.
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William Trevor's Last Literary Gems
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This novel is based on Arthur Conan Doyle's extraordinary real-life fight for justice. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer, George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age; George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.
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Never Ignites
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Everyone believes Adam to be something he’s not. Sometimes that’s because he’s told them a story. Sometimes he’s told himself one. But when Adam joins an Alaskan fishing crew that’s promising quick money, the dangerous work and harsh lifestyle strip away all fabrications and force a dark-hearted exploration of who he really is. On the unforgiving Bering Sea, Adam finds the adventure and authenticity of a fisherman’s life revelatory. The labor required to seize bounty from the ocean invigorates him, and the often crude comradery accompanies a welcome, hard-earned wisdom.
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In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his. Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker. Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels.
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What listeners say about The Only Story
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- TDB
- 05-11-23
Transcends a simple boy-meets-woman narrative
This is certainly one of Julian Barnes' finest novels, in my opinion. For a relatively short work, the author explores an extraordinary range of human emotions, triumphs, and vices.
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- jamie kohl
- 08-12-18
ADeepDive
The narrator set a tone that was intoxicating. It felt almost like someone whispering their deepest secrets. The story navigating a life examined explored multiple important themes, including infidelity, love, abuse, alcoholism. Moving, thoughtful and engaging.
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1 person found this helpful
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- KP
- 09-21-18
The Only Story
I really loved Julian Barnes’ previous book, The Sense of an Ending. This book, The Only Story, seems a lot sadder and more depressing, which is saying a lot since The Sense of an Ending wasn’t the happiest book around, anyway! This one also has to do with a love affair between a younger man and a much older woman, but it is more simply a look back by the younger man, who is now 50+, in order to examine what went wrong with the affair and to try to make sense of his life.
I enjoyed that the couple met on the tennis courts playing doubles, since that’s my game. Some tennis symbolism in the book is interesting, too. While they are playing tennis, Susan who is then 45 warns Casey Paul, all of 19 years old, to watch out for the middle of the court where players can most easily win a point by dividing their opponents with a good shot down the middle. It’s a common strategy in doubles tennis. THEN when Susan and Casey go to bed together soon after, Susan whispers, “Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.” This rings true at the start of their relationship and proves to be a potent symbol of a weakness in it later on: the space between them, the differences between them. And I laughed when, on their very first sexual encounter, as they look down at the bed in front of them, Susan says, “ Which side do you prefer? Forehand or backhand?” I’ll remember that one ☺
I do think Barnes is a good writer! One technique in this book that I loved is how he starts out the book from the first person perspective of the young man, Casey Paul. Barnes writes, “And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realize that there are other persons, and other tenses.” In the second section, Barnes writes in the second person. It’s almost like the story is becoming so tragic and complicated that the writer is retreating to the second person as a way to show distance that is developing between the two lovers. And then by the third section, there is a further retreat to the third person. The author writes, “But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed." I appreciate how the writer’s voice echoes the deterioration of the relationship. Interesting.
The relationship between Susan and Casey should have been a fling. The fact that they kept it going on and on seems to have ruined both of them! That is the tragedy. In the beginning, Casey likes the idea of the relationship because it was so against what his parents and society would condone. He condemns people like his parents as “furrow dwellers” living out a boring existence for decades from which there is “no escape, no turning back.” By continuing his relationship with Susan for decades, he ironically succumbs to the same fate in a sense, although his fate is really more tragic in its outcome. Still Casey says about himself and Susan toward the end, “… still they hadn’t been defeated by practicality.” Hmm. Better to be practical than to end up with the fate of those two, in my opinion.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Tami
- 05-03-18
An ok book
While I enjoyed this book, it was a bit long in parts. However, worth reading.
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- Maria Herrera
- 01-27-19
Not just a love story
I would find myself putting the book down and thinking is this a book about a love affair or is it a book about the many things of love? He strips some of the platitudes our culture decorates love with and poignantly admits its difficulties and the unsung heroism of allowing love. The moral portrait of the times is also treated fairly.
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- Folantin
- 02-07-23
amazing
This is an incredibly painful philosophical tale regarding the nature and meaning of love. The plot concerns a 19 year old youth who falls in love with a married woman who is 30 years older. The story charts their relationship avoiding cliche. Perfect narration with just the right touches of narrator self doubt
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- Joe Kraus
- 01-15-20
One of the best, at this best
I’m tempted to quip that this one is The Graduate meets Weekend in Vegas. And, at a basic plot level, it is something like that. Nineteen-year-old Paul falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, and they embark on a multi-year affair. Then, sometime later, Susan becomes an alcoholic, and Paul works in vain to “save” her from herself.
Barnes is a powerful writer, and describing the book as those stories well told does begin to do it justice. As this goes on, though, it becomes all that and something more.
Above all, this is a novel exploring the way the world looks to someone who has lived it. The frame narrative here comes from Paul, looking back on his own long life, and recalling what he has experienced. Early in their affair, Susan explains to him that everyone has a love story. It may be a failed one, it may even be one that never happened outside private imagination, but everyone has one such story. And it is, for everyone, “the only story,” the private and powerful experience of reaching out to someone else in a love he or she can’t then understand.
So, while the original love story comes with real grace and detail – their “court”-ship takes place over tennis and her husband is a three-dimensional boor – and her descent into alcoholism works as a powerfully sad story, what elevates this to the status of top-tier world literature is Barnes’s capacity for reflecting on the nature of story as self-definition.
It’s striking that this begins and ends in the first-person yet, for a stretch toward the end, it lapses into third-person. That feels like breaking the rules, but it works. And it works because Barnes insistently pushes us to consider the experience of how we narrate our lives to ourselves.
There are parts here that might be condescending in the hands of a lesser writer. Paul reflects on how, as an older man, he understands things he could never have understood in his youth. That could so easily be banal, but here it’s subtle and earned. As an older man, Paul is unfulfilled and idiosyncratic. He could not be the man he is without having experienced Susan. Susan is largely gone for him, though, and he can understand the relative disappointments of his later life only through story – as the titular only story.
It’s hard to say much more than that Barnes is justifiably one of the great writers working in our time. I understand him as one of those Booker-prize regulars, someone the British recognize as the best they have. I have admired a number of his earlier novels, and now I realize I have a real pleasure in front of me as I catch up on some of the others.
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- chad404
- 05-03-18
by far the most unremarkable book I ever heard
Narration is fine so no fault there. As the first 15 minutes unfolded I thought/hoped this book might read like the diary of an old man that you find tucked under some books at a garage sale, you know a real treasure. You give it the benefit of the doubt for the first 30 minutes because you respect your elders and you think/hope they can share something wise with you. However, after you have totally zoned out for 7 hours as this book literally has gone nowhere and at the speed of water freezing into lava (makes no sense just like the book) you sadly realize that it is fact not a sage old man's diary but actually the uncompleted coloring book of 3 year old that had only 2 crayons (both made of slightly different shades of grey).
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- Linda Bigelow McCue
- 04-30-18
worst book ever. painful to listen to til the end.
one of the most boring books ever with a non ending and chapters that seemed to drag on
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- Elizabeth
- 07-20-18
Sorry, Julian. Not this time.
Pretty bad all round. I love British fiction of all periods, and have been reading Julian Barnes since the days of Flaubert's Parrot. This was just plain dull and repetitive, lacking dramatic tension or any kind of depth of character. I couldn't finish it, and the annoyingly maudlin voice the narrator gave to the female characters was off-putting. I kept wondering whether it would be better to read this than to listen to it, but the story itself didn't have enough to recommend it. I see what Barnes was trying to do, but he didn't do it. The novel was neither a meditation on love nor was it an exploration of the uses and failures of memory; the framework of the book allowed for either of these possibilities, but it didn't come to fruition. I kept wondering what a writer like Ian McEwan could have made of this very basic and shopworn plot.
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