Katie Kitamura paints a nuanced picture of the dissolution of a marriage in her third novel, after New York Public Library Young Lions finalists The Longshot and Gone to the Forest. Married five years, the sensible narrator accepts that her philandering writer husband, Christopher, will not change and divorce is inevitable. She recognizes that "it was no small thing, dismantling the edifice of a marriage... some continuous and ongoing thing, rather than a decisive and singular act." Besides, she's also taken a lover. A full stop is imminent.
But Christopher has disappeared from London. His willful mother locates him at an off-season resort hotel in a southern seaside Greek village and bluntly instructs her daughter-in-law to bring him home. Off she goes, intent on confronting Christopher with divorce and getting on with her life. Upon arrival in Gerolimenas, however, she discovers a bleak scene: the hotel is nearly empty, the countryside is charred by fires set by feuding farmers, the sea is too cold for swimming, feral dogs prowl at the hotel gate, the Greek economic collapse has shuttered much of the village, and Christopher has disappeared again. He's left a young, lovelorn hotel receptionist and a suite full of scattered clothes and pages for an unfinished book. Through the narrator's sensibilities and observations, Kitamura adeptly fills in this portrait of a woman gradually understanding that her marriage and her husband aren't what they seemed--and neither is she. A Separation is a tightly wound novel of self-discovery and forbearance. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.