Leaving

A Novel

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Pub Date Feb 13 2024 | Archive Date Jan 31 2024

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Description

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.

About the Author: Roxana Robinson is the award-winning author of six novels and three short story collections. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, and other publications.

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...


Advance Praise

"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." - Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion

"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." - Geraldine Brooks, author of Horse

"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." - Amy Bloom, author of In 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." - Joan Silber, author of The Secrets of Happiness

"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." - Gish Jen, author of The Resisters

"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." - Meg Wolitzer...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781324065388
PRICE $28.99 (USD)
PAGES 344

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Average rating from 43 members


Featured Reviews

A heartbreaking and lyrical story. Beautiful prose that lingers way after you close the book. Characters that are vividly drawn and flawed. I loved every moment of this.

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I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A couple who dated in college had a chance encounter at an opera and reconnected. Love happened. Choices were made. Oh, the ending.....

Read this novel. It is truly amazing.

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This was such a captivating read - late in life romance but with lots of sticky loose ends and traumatic declarations. It ended...wow...not how I expected it to end! But the characters were lovely and real and honest and this is one that will stick with me for a bit.

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‘Leaving’ begins as a quiet love story, both tender and lovely.
Warren and Sarah had been lovers in college, yet ended up going their separate ways. A chance meeting many years later reignites their relationship, though in between there have been marriages and children.
As their love for each other renews and blossoms, Warren, the one still married, encounters a resistance from the family unit he had nurtured for 30+ years, a resistance severe enough to be devastating.
The author sets a perfect pace for the story, subtly increasing in intensity, and culminating in an ending that took my breath away!

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