Already an international literary sensation, and translated into eleven languages, Dan Franck's superbly elegant novel is both a microscopically observed, day-by-day account of a marriage going unexpectedly awry and a portrait of a generation whose young ideals - nurtured in the liberating political turbulence of 1968 France - fade as its members edge warily into their forties.

Offering a bittersweet commentary on marriage and morals in the nineties, Separation is also the story of one man's obsession - with his wife, with the life they lead together, and with the children they raise together. And it is the story of his passionate desire - and nearly crippling inability - to prevent any of it from slipping away. It is also - somewhat ironically - deeply romantic, and one of the most luminous portrayals of women in recent fiction.

Confronted with the devastating reality of his wife's infatuation with another man and the prospect of being separated from his two young sons, the narrator seeks comfort and solace by scribbling notes of his daily experiences, and in conversations with friends (mostly women) who pour out advice to him.

They encourage the narrator, who is a novelist and screen-writer, to organize his notes into a document, and he finds himself writing a novel - this novel - in which he treats a white-hot emotional situation with an almost shocking coolness, and from a startling distance. None of the characters have names, and the style with which they are described is deliberately austere

1. Separation speaks to an entire generation of people looking over their shoulders and attempting to determine, each in his or her own fashion, what went wrong with their lives - and why. They discover - as does the narrator himself - that sometimes a final, irrevocable rupture is precisely what it takes to do the one thing they never learned to do before: grow up.