“One More Thing” (One Story) is the newest novel (published in Britain in February 2018) by the celebrated Julian Barnes, Booker Prize laureate, Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters, and one of contemporary Britain’s most vivid and original prose writers. “One Story” is, as The Times puts it, “a perceptive, jewel-like analysis of what goes on in the head and in the soul of a person in love”; it is also, according to The Observer, “a deeper and more effective exploration of a theme already touched by Barnes in The Sense of an Ending—a novel for which he finally received the Booker Prize.”
“As most of us have only one story ready-made,” Barnes writes, “countless events happen—stories can be made as many as you like. But one thing matters: one single story; ultimately, only that one is worth telling.”
So, meet Paul. He is nineteen. At a tennis club in a quiet London suburb, he meets Mrs. Susan MacLeod—she is forty-eight. And that is where their only story begins, because “lovers tend to think their story doesn’t fit any categories or labels”…