Bestselling and award-winning author Suzanne Finnamore writes a story of divorce that is “brilliant” (Augusten Burroughs) and sure to become a classic.

There are certain books that come to epitomize their painful subject matter, offering solace to those who share the same fate and pleasure to those who merely appreciate fine writing. What The Year of Magical Thinkingdid for grief, what Drinking: A Love Storydid for alcoholism, now Split does for divorce. Prescriptive yet full of pragmatic advice, insight and black humor, Split is a finely wrought tourniquet for a broken union and its attendant trauma.

Suzanne Finnamore, author of the novel Otherwise Engaged, didn’t see it coming. Well, perhaps she saw something—for example, a cocktail napkin on which her husband, N, had scribbled a Cole Porter love song and someone else’s name—but she refused to acknowledge it. She was busy tending to their one-year-old son, then applying makeup, donning high heels, and mixing a martini to greet N with when he arrived home at night. Until the night N came home, told her she looked beautiful, changed his clothes, and announced that he was leaving.

In crystalline, riveting prose, Finnamore tells the story of her divorce, and her marriage, and how it all imploded and came back together, changed. At once quite funny, achingly sad, and unflinchingly fierce, Split will resonate with anyone who’s endured the end of a relationship.