'A novel of dignified beauty'

OBSERVER

'A masterly piece of writing, rich with insight and detail, and a curiously moving optimism'

GAY TIMES

'A discreet, lyrical meditation on the nature of male love'

EDMUND WHITE

Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. Leo, a renowned Italian writer and Thomas's boyfriend, finds it impossible to mourn his loss and condemns himself to wandering the Earth, in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living and the dead.

He travels through a Europe where past and present overlap, roads intersect, years merge and faces emerge - and tries in vain to bring into focus the blurred lines of their relationship. Believing he could protect himself, Leo had forced Thomas to live in a separate room, a separate city, a separate life. And now he will have to cross the ocean to find - after a descent into hell - the strength to live on.

Structured in three musical movements, Separate Rooms is a story of almost ideal homosexual love, cruelly broken by absence and separation.