A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband that it's time for them to separate. For the moment, they intend to keep this agreement a secret from others.

But then he goes missing in a remote region of rugged southern Greece. The woman, still officially his wife, agrees to fly out and go looking for him, keeping their estrangement to herself.

But as the search comes to a shocking breaking point, she discovers that she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love.

The author, Katie Kitamura, is an American novelist, journalist and art critic. She was born in California in 1979 to a family of Japanese origin and her father was a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Davis.

Her first novel, The Longshot, (2009) echoes the world of martial arts to which she had been introduced by her brother. The book is about the preparation undertaken by a fighter and his trainer before a championship fight against a famous opponent.

Her second novel, Gone to the Forest (2013) is set in an unnamed colonial country and describes the life and suffering of a landowning family against a backdrop of civil strife and political change.

The book being reviewed today, A Separation, was published in 2017 and later adapted for a film starring Katherine Waterston.

Another novel, Intimacies, maybe the author's best so far, appeared in 2021. An interpreter has gone to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place she can finally call home. She is drawn into simmering personal dramas. Her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime that the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she's asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.

All Kitamura's novels are in a sense about language but the book being reviewed here does not seem to have enthused many readers and critics.

We are told the story from the point of view of the woman who is left unnamed throughout the whole book. There could have been space left for an alternative view since the woman herself was the one who stood most to benefit from the husband's death.

Nevertheless the burnt landscape, the disappearance of the man, and the brilliantly cold, precise and yet threatening, churning tone of the narrator lift the book above the run of the mill whodunnits.