In Love [Paperback]

This “heart-stoppingly good” masterpiece about a crumbling love affair in 1950s New York perfectly captures “the desperate desire for love and the recognition that it is slipping away” (Slate).

“One of the greatest, bleakest breakup stories ever told.” — The New York Observer

New York in the 1950s. A man on a barstool is telling a story about a woman he met in a bar, early married and soon divorced, her child farmed out to her parents, good-looking, if a little past her prime. They’d gone out, they’d grown close, but as far as he was concerned it didn’t add up to much. He was a busy man.

Then one day, out dancing, she runs into a rich awkward lovelorn businessman. He’ll pay for her to be his, pay her a lot. And now the narrator discovers that he is as much in love with her as she is with him, perhaps more, though it will take him a while to realize just how utterly lost he is.

Executed with the cool smoky brilliance of a classic Miles Davis track, In Love is an unequaled exploration of the tethered—and untethered—heart. Hayes, a master of psychological prose, seems to have cherished few illusions. The fictional world of In Love…is one of brief pleasures and bleak self-knowledge, of discoveries nearly made or made too late…His authorial gaze is so penetrating that it’s practically carcinogenic: you get the feeling that it could, while revealing someone’s insides, disassemble atoms, mutate cells—the illumination of pain leaving scars of its own. —Brian Patrick Eha, City Journal

The story of a casual love affair that becomes serious as soon it startl)