Excerpt from The American Lover by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A year after Rosalita leaves, Beth is able to walk once more, with the aid of a stick.

One day she takes the bus to Harrods, suddenly interested to visit the place where she'd worked long ago, cutting wrapping paper with mathematical care, fashioning bows and rosettes out of ribbon, making the most insignificant of gifts look expensive and substantial. It had seemed to her a futile thing to be doing, but now it doesn't strike her as futile. She can see that a person's sanity might sometimes reside in the appreciation of small but aesthetically pleasing things.

Holding fast to her stick, she gets on to the familiar escalators. The feeling of being moved around so effortlessly, whether up or down, has always given her pleasure. As a child, she used to beg to be brought here, to the escalators. She loved to watch the people moving in the opposite direction, like dolls on a factory conveyor belt.

She's watching them now, these human dolls: a multitude of faces, ascending to Soft Furnishings, descending to Perfumerie and Banking, all locked away in their own stories.

Then she see Thaddeus.

He's descending. She's going up. She stares at him as he passes, then cranes her head round to keep watching him as he goes on down. And she sees that he, too, has turned. Changed as she is, he has recognised her. His face is locked on hers.

She gets off the escalator at the first floor (Lingerie, Ladies' Shoes, Children's Clothes). Her heart cries out for her to run to the descending escalator, to follow Thaddeus, to rush into his arms. But her body is too slow. Her legs won't let her run. She stands on the first-floor landing, looking down.

She sees Thaddeus stop and look up. Then he joins the people surging towards the exit doors and follows them out.

Excerpted from The American Lover by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Tremain. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.