Separate Rooms

Soon to be a major film adaptation by Luca Guadagnino, Separate Rooms is a masterpiece of Italian literature, and a heartbreaking portrait of love, grief, and the daily realities of being a gay man in 1980s Europe.

Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover. So, he condemns himself to wandering the earth instead, moving cities every few weeks in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living and the dead.

He travels through a Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge, and reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. From their meeting and nights spent in Paris to the drug-induced flight through the forests of northern France that spelled the end, Leo’s memories become clearer with every road he takes—much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, and wanting to preserve the passion of their relationship, Leo had forced Thomas to live separately: in separate rooms, separate towns, with separate lives. But now, face to face with true solitude, Leo must finally reckon with the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and, ultimately, cross an ocean to find the strength to go on.

André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Separate Rooms: a singular and unforgettable meditation on almost-ideal love, told in three musical movements, by a treasured literary talent never before published in the US.