Leaving: A Novel

by Roxana Robinson, Hannah Choi (Read by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874725471
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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. She lives in New York City and Connecticut, spends as much time as she can in Maine, and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Hannah Choi is an American actress based in Los Angeles. Her TV/film credits include appearances on ABC's How to Get Away with Murder, American Housewife, and Grand Hotel. She received her MA in acting from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire "across the pond" in the United Kingdom. Her roles often showcase strong, trustworthy, career professionals with a sometimes dry and sarcastic bent. When not narrating, Hannah can be found with a good cup of tea, or throwing some new pottery at the ceramics studio. She loves the sci-fi fantasy genre in any medium, and is a particular lover of rainy days.

Editorial Reviews

11/13/2023

Robinson (Sparta) once again examines the moral behavior of family members and lovers in her adroit if schematic latest. Decades have passed since Sarah, a late-middle-aged divorced museum curator, last saw her college sweetheart Warren. They meet again at an opera in New York City and, though Warren is married now, they begin an affair, acknowledging what a mistake it was to have parted all those years ago. When Warren leaves his wife, Janet, their 20-something daughter, Kat, is furious at him and emotionally blackmails Warren by threatening to bar him from her wedding and future grandchildren unless he breaks things off with Sarah. Eventually, Warren decides he’s morally obligated to return to his wife, and he splits with Sarah. Several years pass, and Sarah settles into life without Warren, while he withers in the shadow of his unforgiving daughter. Robinson writes skillfully and sensitively about Sarah’s feeling for her children and grandchildren, and about her daughter’s agony and terror of childbirth, but Warren, infuriatingly weak and curiously inarticulate in the face of Kat’s haranguing, seems no more than a vehicle for Robinson’s story. This bleak outing offers glimmers of the author’s past greatness but doesn’t reach the same heights. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"With searing perception and genuine empathy, Robinson…captures the fraught nuances of complicated family dynamics, treating the spurned-lover trope with gentleness and compassion."

Booklist (starred review) - Carol Haggas

"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 a marvelous read."

Gish Jen

"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

"Leaving navigates the chasm between responsibility and desire when two long-lost lovers reconnect. This beautiful book will sweep you away."

People Magazine

"This lithe novel engrosses. Robinson’s storytelling is classic, page after page of swiftly moving scenes and writing as precise as rows of tilled earth. Robinson proves that writers can still evoke the silences and renunciations that thwart desire, and that stars still cross. The ending is a bombshell, eminently discussable."

New York Times - Amity Gaige

"Leavingis full of insights about the ambiguities, demands, and mysteries attached to passion, love, and commitment."

Psychology Today - Glenn C. Altschuler

"An impassioned portrayal of desire and loyalty, of romantic love and family duty, and an exploration into what we owe to each other—and to ourselves."

Oprah Daily

"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

"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

"An operatic tragedy about passion and honor…poised to fuel many a book group discussion."

NPR - Heller McAlpin

"A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, Leaving is a tour de force and arguably Robinson's finest work yet. Robinson’s writing—unfailingly clear-eyed, packed with psychological insights—compels readers to care passionately about the characaters. Leaving stands as a wondrous feat, and its final impact shatters."

Washington Post - Joan Frank

★ 2023-12-06
Forty years after their breakup, lovers run into each other at intermission in the opera house, and nothing will ever be the same.

Warren Jennings and Sarah Watson dated in their youth, but between the miles separating their colleges, a silly but fatal misunderstanding, and a new face on the horizon, she chose to end the relationship. By the time they reconnect, he is long married, living near Boston, a successful architect. She is divorced, a grandmother, on her own in Westchester County. After they serendipitously meet at a performance of Tosca in New York City, the error of their separation is quickly evident and they begin an affair. To them, it feels less like adultery than a course correction, likely to lead to the greater happiness of all. But as Warren will one day explain to his wife, Janet, “In an opera, the tragedy involves passion and honor,” and so it is here, with passion and honor at odds, and the irrevocable responsibilities and emotions of parenthood complicating the situation in unforeseen ways. “They’re sort of at the heart of everything now,” says Sarah, speaking of her adult children. “…We’re marginal. At sixty.” “But that’s not how I feel,” Warren replies, his whole being rekindled by the force of this unexpected, ferocious emotion. Every character and relationship in the two families is beautifully drawn, in sentences that manage to be both spare and rich at once. Also in play is the power of art to give our lives shape and meaning: Tosca, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay, and the paintings of the Bloomsbury Group add texture to the story. As the novel builds toward its operatic conclusion, Robinson’s profound, complex depiction of family relationships and responsibilities and the difficult choices they entail will resonate with readers in every phase of their own lives.

Elegantly structured and written, shimmering with feeling and truth. A triumph.

Kirkus Reviews