Leaving : A Novel
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3.0 • 10 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A long-neglected flame is reignited in this thoughtful novel about love, commitment, and living with our choices. Sarah and Warren were infatuated with each other during college, but a misunderstanding suddenly ended their relationship—until they unexpectedly meet again, 40 long years later. As their love affair begins again, author Roxana Robinson effortlessly brings us into these two characters’ worlds as they reminisce together on their young love, separately evaluate their own marriages, and navigate the contradictory feelings that come with an adulterous relationship that’s born out of real connection. This novel beautifully explores what it means to move through different seasons in life, and we were particularly fascinated by the way Sarah and Warren’s respective relationships with their adult children prompted them to examine their feelings about commitment and obligation. Narrator Hannah Choi really taps into this unexpectedly cerebral aspect of the story. This beautiful, reflective listen will leave you with plenty to think about.
Customer Reviews
Narrator
I listens to the first 3 hours of this book but the monotone narrator was just awful and I couldn’t bare to finish it!
I didn’t even need to k ow how it ended bc I was falling asleep listening.
Maybe the book is better.
Pretentious, overwrought, overblown, and the worst narrator ever
The author took a classic premise - the forbidden love affair - and took egregious liberties with hubris-filled and obvious references to a Chapter One opera (hello Age of Innocence) and even a blatant reference to the beloved Edith Wharton classic, Age of Innocence. Instead of leaving Wharton’s classic unadulterated, this novel pretended to reimagine the story as if told by Countess Olenska (here, a mealy mouthed “Sarah”) and a Newland Archer character (the cowardly “Warren.” It was as if she was purporting to account for the time (and most drawn-out innermost thoughts) of Wharton’s characters, from the middle of Age of Innocence to what this pretentious author thought “might” have happened to Archer in the end. One of the worst books ever recommended by a manager at an independent bookstore! Wharton must be roiling in her grave!