Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2017
240 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
This is her story. About the end of her marriage. About what happened when Christopher went missing and she went to find him. These are her secrets, this is what happened...
A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it's time for them to separate. For the moment it's a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she's not even sure if she wants to find him. As her search comes to a shocking breaking point, she discovers she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love.
A searing, suspenseful story of intimacy and infidelity, A Separation lays bare the gult that divides us from the inner lives of others. With exquisitely cool precision, Katie Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on edge, with a fiercely mesmerizing story to tell.
"Starred Review. Tautly austere, lyrical and jarring...For readers seeking profound examinations of challenging relationships . . . Kitamura's oeuvre will be a compelling discovery." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. A spare and stunning portrait of a marital estrangement...A minutely observed novel of infidelity unsettles its characters and readers." - Kirkus Reviews
"Despite the mysterious premise, readers may find that the narrator's frequent contemplation frustratingly stalls the novel." - Publishers Weekly
"At once cool and burning, Kitamura's immersive, probing psychological tale benefits from its narrator's precise observations and nimble use of language." - Booklist
"A slow burn of a novel that gathers its great force and intensity through careful observation and a refusal to accept old, shopworn narratives of love and loss." - Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
"A novel so seamless, that follows its path with such consequence, that even minor deviations seem loaded with meaning. Wonderful." - Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle
"The burnt landscape, the disappearance of a man, the brilliantly cold, precise, and yet threatening, churning tone of the narrator—make A Separation an absolutely mesmerizing work of art." - Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
"Profound and gripping. I had that rare sense of feeling like I was in a creation specifically made out of words, that couldn't have been made out of any other substance. Kitamura combines the calm complexity of Joseph Conrad with the pacing and reveal of Patricia Highsmith. This novel is a wonder and a pleasure." - Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances and Little Labors
"A Separation opens up fissures of ambiguity in emotional experiences too often misunderstood as monolithic—grief, desire, estrangement—and plumbs these crevices for all their complexities. It has both urgency and afterglow: I read it quickly, but didn't stop thinking about it for a long time once I was done." - Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
This information about A Separation was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katie Kitamura is a critic and novelist living in New York City. She is the author of Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship, Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and is a regular contributor to Frieze.
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