It was always going to be a reading holiday: I really like Thessaloniki, but I’ve spent enough time there to feel a resident rather than a visitor with an urgent need to see the town. Also, more than anything, I needed some time to relax and empty the brain. Still, before I took the plane back home on Monday, I had read all the books I had bought for the purpose as well as the two spare ones I had borrowed from the library. That was when I picked up Andrew Sean Greer’s The Story of a Marriage from Dimitra’s pile. It turned out to be the best book I read this summer.

There are a few authors whose prose is so beautiful that after finishing a book you want to start again right away just to experience their choice of language some more. This happened to me earlier this year with Marilynne Robinson and then with Jon McGregor. Now I felt the same about Andrew Sean Greer. Apart from the subtle, almost poetic language, he shares both mentioned authors’ capacity to really and deeply understand someone’s life. It is hard to say what the book is really about without spoiling part of the story, but Greer (born in 1970) portrays an interesting and touching picture of things people didn’t talk about in the early 1950s in the USA (or anywhere else, for that matter). Added to that, the plot is as surprising as brilliant, and takes the book to even greater heights. I almost cried when I finished it on the plane.