Divorce Is in the Air — Gonzalo Torne

The American debut of a highly acclaimed Spanish writer: a sly, acerbic novel about love -- or the end of love -- and how hard it can be to let go.

There's a lot about Joan-Marc that his second wife doesn't know -- and that he now sets out to tell her, come what may. He begins with his disastrous first marriage to an American named Helen, and the vacation they took in a last-ditch attempt to save their relationship. From there Joan-Marc unfurls the story of his life, from early memories of adolescence to a reckoning with mortality in his forties: friendships he abandoned, women he wronged, the wide swathe he cut across polite society in Madrid and Barcelona. Joan-Marc may be the kind of man we love to hate, yet his caustic wit, nostalgia, and self-pity are ultimately as winning as they are devastating.

Here is an audacious new voice, an unapologetic portrait of an antihero navigating the perilous shoals of modern life -- a man struggling with long-held illusions about the inexorable forward march of time.