‟Roxana Robinson’s stunning new novel, Leaving, cost me some sleep, and continues to reverberate. A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, it is a tour de force and arguably her finest work yet.
Leaving
What risks would you be willing to take to fall in love again?
“I never thought I’d see you here,” Sarah says. Then she adds, “But I never thought I’d see you anywhere.”
Sarah and Warren’s college love story ended in a single moment. Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites—threatening the foundations of the lives they’ve built apart. Since they parted in college, each has married, raised a family, and made a career. When they meet again, Sarah is divorced and living outside New York, while Warren is still married and living in Boston.
Seeing Warren sparks an awakening in Sarah, who feels emotionally alive for the first time in decades. Still, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce and years of framing her life around her children and her work. Warren has no such reservations: he wants to leave his marriage but can’t predict how his wife and daughter will react. As their affair intensifies, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other.
Leaving charts a passage through loyalty and desire as it builds to a shattering conclusion. In her boldest and most powerful work to date, Roxana Robinson demonstrates her “trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life” (Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune) in an engrossing exploration of the vows we make to one another, the tensile relationships between parents and their children, and what we owe to others and ourselves.
Available February, 2024
‟The ending is a bombshell, eminently discussable. This lithe novel engrosses. Robinson proves that writers can still evoke the silences and renunciations that thwart desire, and that stars still cross.
‟Leaving, which chronicles the couple's evolving feelings during months of hotel trysts, is poised to fuel many a book group discussion. Sarah is at first ashamed that she is seeing a married man and worried that she is betraying "the sisterhood." But as their relationship blossoms, her "moral landscape" shifts and she reasons that "it's not her responsibility to protect Warren's marriage.
‟As it navigates the chasm between responsibility and desire, this beautiful book will sweep you away.
‟Leaving is a passionate portrait of marriages, of parenthood (early and late), and the tectonic shifts of family life. Roxana Robinson brings her wit, her beautiful sentences, and her compassionate clarity to this book about the price of love and the enduring need for it.
‟What does love demand of us, and who must pay the price? Leaving is a searing interrogation of honor and passion. It dissects the hidden cost of the choices we make, and the consequences with which we must endeavor to live.
‟If to the combustible elements of passion, honor, love, and art, you add the complexities of modern parenting, you get the conflagration that is Leaving. Compelling, heart-stopping, and all too believable, this is marvelous read.
‟Roxana Robinson delivers an insightful and haunting meditation on the boundaries of love.
‟A remarkable novel—a quietly expansive story, in which elements of love and family coalesce and escalate into tragedy. Leaving has a plot in which surprises abound, as broken conventions lead to menace and threat. A triumph of a book.
‟Elegantly structured and written, shimmering with feeling and truth. A triumph.
‟Roxana Robinson’s brilliant and utterly absorbing new novel Leaving charts an unprecedented passage through the depths of emotional complexity andhugo character to ask the questions What is a family? What is love? and What do we owe to ourselves? I could not put it down.
‟Leaving is as absorbing as it is haunting, powered by Roxana Robinson’s deep understanding of ambiguities, allegiances, and the lengths people must sometimes go to navigate them.