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What risks would you be willing to take to fall in love again? In this one-of-a-kind event, Roxana Robinson discusses her novel Leaving with Amanda Vaill.

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 their lives. 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 fears 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.

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, “Leaving is a tour de force—unfailingly clear-eyed, and its final impact shatters." (Washington Post)

Roxana Robinson is the award-winning author of seven 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.

Amanda Vaill, formerly executive editor at Viking Penguin, edited and published Roxana Robinson's first novel, Summer Light. She is the author of Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Hotel Florida, and Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has written on arts and culture for New York, Esquire, Ballet Review, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, and other publications.

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