Meet Ella Miller, a 36-year-old archae­ol­o­gist with a six-year-old son and a hus­band she believes is tyran­ni­cal and no longer loves. Decid­ing to leave him is easy; it’s the dif­fi­cult after­math that sur­pris­es her. Unable to stand on her own, she quick­ly takes up with anoth­er man — a sen­si­tive psy­chol­o­gist whom she helps coax to leave his fam­i­ly— but finds fault with him too.

She gar­ners sym­pa­thy but only for so long. Soon, Ella, with her self-serv­ing run-on sen­tences and lack of con­cern for every­one around her, becomes a bore. Shrill and whiny, she reverts to the self-cen­tered child of dys­func­tion­al par­ents before our eyes. She counts on her new lover to thrill her ​“with the promise of the ful­fill­ment of that ancient yearn­ing for the knight in shin­ing armor who will res­cue me from the incisors of this cou­ple between whose teeth I was gnashed, wan­der­ing from mouth to mouth, it’s a we that no longer includes them, only me and him…” The book’s page count doesn’t help Ella’s plight. Sen­tences that last for para­graphs give her more time to alien­ate her lover — and her read­ers; the book would be a more enjoy­able read minus a cou­ple hun­dred pages.

There is no ques­tion that author Zeruya Shalev is a mas­ter of beau­ti­ful pow­ers of descrip­tion and pos­sess­es an incred­i­ble mind. A voice creaks ​“as though it hasn’t been used in years” and singing is hes­i­tant ​“like a prayer with no hope of being answered.” Whether or not she intends for Ella to serve as a sym­pa­thet­ic hero­ine, Shalev has doc­u­ment­ed in fic­tion a haunt­ing account of the heart­break of divorce that rings true.