While sitting on a French terrace overlooking a three-hundred-year-old olive grove at sunset, a man listens as his wife confesses her love for someone else. Preparing to leave after twenty years of marriage, she details her erotic and emotional life, a confession that leaves her husband spent but delirious with love for her. The imminent loss of the passion of his life leads him to experience the power of desire, grief, and flushed obsession--and thus begins this riveting monologue at the end of a marriage, one that is mesmerizing with anger and regret.

Entirely alive in these intense...