James Salter

Nedra and Viri Berland live a beautiful life in a house on the Hudson River with their daughters, friends, dinner parties, and winters in Europe. The novel follows their marriage across two decades as it slowly unravels — not through drama but through the accumulation of small divergences.

An American photographer in France narrates — and partly invents — the affair between Philip Dean, a young American, and Anne-Marie Costallat, a French shop girl. The narrator is unreliable; the affair may be partly or wholly imagined. The prose is among the most beautiful in American fiction.