Separate Rooms

by Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Overview

“A story of love and youth and pain that will have you clutching at your heart. I want everyone to read it; I want to press it into people’s hands. Surely one of the best novels I’ve ever read.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost

A LitHub and LGBTQ Reads Most Anticipated Book of 2025 • An Observer Pride Month Read

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781638932086
Publisher:	Zando
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Pier Vittorio Tondelli was born in Correggio in 1955 and died in 1991. He made his debut in 1980 with Altri libertini, which was followed in 1982 by Pao Pao. In 1985 he published the novel Rimini, followed by Biglietti agli amici in 1986 and Separate Rooms in 1989.

Editorial Reviews

A LitHub and LGBTQ Reads Most Anticipated Book of 2025 • An Observer Pride Month Read

“[A] perfect elegy of grief and a neo-Platonical understanding of lost love . . . beautifully and thematically contained and composed . . . as [Tondelli] calibrated his neologisms, wordplay, lyrical rants, and Chinese boxes of sentences, he could finally build a bridge between representing time and transcending time. This is what Separate Rooms is in the end: a contemplative novel, the result of an author finally entering his own cathedral of solitude.” —The Paris Review

“Separate Rooms is a classic in Italy: a story of love and youth and pain that will have you clutching at your heart. I want everyone to read it; I want to press it into people’s hands. Surely one of the best novels I’ve ever read.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost

“An Italian novel of imperfect love and urgent grief.” —New York Times

“I was in the hands, not of an occasional writer, but of one who had fathomed both himself and his true, complex, frequently unsortable emotions. His capacity to probe and articulate these contradictory strains arrested me and presaged a writer never pleased with easy answers . . . For it’s a novel both exceptionally moving yet exceptionally lucid as it weaves its way through the twisted strands of what Leo is desperately trying to unearth and parse in himself.” —from the foreword by André Aciman

“A discreet, lyrical meditation on the nature of male love.” —Edmund White, National Book Award-winning author

“A stunning novel . . . a picture of queer love at once woozy, intimate and frayed at the edges by grief and history . . . If you ever need reminding why we run towards connection, even in the face of risk and loss, read this book, and prepare to be deeply moved.” —Jack Parlett, author of Fire Island

“[A] moving story on mourning love as a queer person.” —Observer

“The new Call Me by Your Name . . . a book that manages to be beautiful and poignant without ever falling into the trap of sentimentality.” —The Times (London)

“Call[s] to mind the films of Éric Rohmer . . . There is a refreshing worldliness to Tondelli’s characters and his own street-by-street knowledge of numerous cities across Europe . . . [The prose] feels anachronistically modern. It is every bit as fresh as anything André Aciman or Seán Hewitt would be writing today. Despite his untimely death in 1991, Tondelli has made a welcome return to the queer canon.” —Big Issue (London)

From the Publisher