"A novelist at the height of his powers ... Quietly devastating." -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst * The Times *
"Critics reckon it's Barnes's best novel for many years and roundly praised the `emotional acuity' of his writing." -- Laura Powell * Telegraph *
"Exquisite." -- Kate Clanchy * Guardian *
"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 gentle, bleak, and brilliant novel." -- Jon Day * Financial Times *
"Immensely powerful." -- Alex Clark * New Statesman *
"This intense, taut, sad and often beautiful tale may well be Barnes' best novel for years." -- Lara Feigel * Spectator *
"A tender and heartbreaking novel." -- Alex Preston * Observer *
"As quiet and aching and intimate as a James Blake ballad." -- Rupert Goold
"A sensitive look at what makes lovers tick." -- Robbie Millen * The Times *
"A vivid dramatization of the narcissism of obsessive love." * Economist *
"Cunningly crafted and sharply observed." -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail *
"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 *
"An utterly devastating masterpiece of a novel." -- Anne Cunningham * Irish Independent *
"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 *
"A quietly harrowing novel about the complexity of love and the slipperiness of memory." * The Week *
"Distils some of the pandemonium, and intergenerational conflict, of our own uncertain time." -- Max Lin * i *
"Barnes gives us a novel that asks the profoundest questions about memory, love and human existence." -- Lindsay MacPherson and Ben Felsenburg * Harrods Magazine *
"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 *
"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 *