Room on the Sea by Andre Aciman

“Longing pulses through all of André Aciman’s books . . . He’s a prose poet of confounding desires, an expert on Proust who ruminates on the scent of memories that haunt us.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

 

No one writes about the ups and downs, the yeses and noes, of contemporary love like André Aciman. As Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote in The Times (London): “You don’t so much read André Aciman’s novels as tumble breathlessly into them.”

In Room on the Sea, Aciman offers three heart-wrenching tales of amorous ambivalence, all of which unfold in his inimitably nostalgic style. “The Gentleman from Peru” tells the story of the life-changing encounter between a group of friends and an enigmatic solitary guest in a hotel on the Amalfi Coast. “Room on the Sea” is a dialogue between a man and a woman who meet on jury duty and embark on a complex relationship. “Mariana” is a modern retelling of a famous seventeenth-century novel about a love affair between a nun and a swashbuckling, unreliable aristocrat. Together, Aciman’s novellas form a complex portrait of desire, and of love realized and lost.