This post is a review of Leaving: A Novel. By Roxana Robinson. W.W. Norton & Company. 327 pp. $28.99.

As Leaving, Roxana Robinson’s seventh novel opens, Sarah Blackwell, a college student, has decided to break up with Warren, her longtime boyfriend. The “proximate cause,” she subsequently explains, was Warren’s request that she accompany him on a trip behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of the Cold War, when Communists often arrested American visitors as spies, the plan – and reports that he had been fired from his job for bad behavior (that later proved to be untrue) – convinced Sarah that Warren was foolish and reckless.

Warren didn’t know what hit him, but the two went their separate ways. Sarah married, had two children, divorced, lived in suburban New York and worked as an art curator. An architect in Boston, Warren was married, with one daughter.

Decades later, Sarah and Warren ran into each other on the staircase at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. They quickly realized they were still in love.

In Leaving, Robinson provides a credible, insightful, and often poignant examination of the practical and moral implications of their decision to........

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