Overview
Soon to be a major film adaptation by Luca Guadagnino, Separate Rooms is a heartbreaking “story of love and youth and pain that will have you clutching at your heart” (Andrew Sean Greer) and the daily realities of being a gay man in 1980s Europe.
Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover. So, he condemns himself to wandering the earth instead, moving cities every few weeks in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living and the dead.
He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge, and reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. From their meeting and nights spent in Paris to the drug-induced flight through the forests of northern France that spelled the end, Leo’s memories become clearer with every road he takes—much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, and wanting to preserve the passion of their relationship, Leo had forced Thomas to live separately: in separate rooms, separate towns, with separate lives. But now, face to face with true solitude, Leo must finally reckon with the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and, ultimately, cross an ocean to find the strength to go on.
André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in this “perfect elegy of grief and a neo-Platonical understanding of lost love” (The Paris Review), told in three musical movements by a treasured literary talent being published in the US for the first time.
Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover. So, he condemns himself to wandering the earth instead, moving cities every few weeks in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living and the dead.
He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge, and reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. From their meeting and nights spent in Paris to the drug-induced flight through the forests of northern France that spelled the end, Leo’s memories become clearer with every road he takes—much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, and wanting to preserve the passion of their relationship, Leo had forced Thomas to live separately: in separate rooms, separate towns, with separate lives. But now, face to face with true solitude, Leo must finally reckon with the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and, ultimately, cross an ocean to find the strength to go on.
André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in this “perfect elegy of grief and a neo-Platonical understanding of lost love” (The Paris Review), told in three musical movements by a treasured literary talent being published in the US for the first time.
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