Although the focus of Julian Barnes’s compelling new novel, The Only Story, is a love affair, it isn’t merely a book about love. It is mainly about memory and the vagaries of memory. Nor does Barnes tell just one story. He tells three, weaving their threads together. It’s only after you’ve finished reading the book that you understand the nature of what you’ve read.

At first it might seem that Barnes—the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Man Booker Prize for his 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending—has written a British variation of The Graduate. The narrative begins in the late 1960s, as 19-year-old Paul Roberts is home from university for the summer and has joined a tennis club where he meets 48-year-old Susan Macleod. She stands out from the other suburban London types whom Paul scorns, along with their middle-class values. His first sight of Susan, standing in the sunlight in her white tennis dress with green trim and buttons and a green ribbon tied insouciantly in her hair, could have come right out of James Joyce’s classic on first love, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.