Twice Around a Marriage

"She's like the aging of a first edition of a modernist novel…"
In Twice Around a Marriage, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler delivers a tender and incisive portrait of a couple confronting the stories that bind them-and those that threaten to undo them-while locked down in Paris.

Twice Around a Marriage tells the story of Amanda Duval and Howard Blevins, an early-septuagenarian husband and wife who were once married for twenty-two years, then divorced for ten, and now are in the tenth year of a second-try marriage. They have come to Paris to see if they should attempt to remain together or call it quits. The day after they move into a tiny AirBNB apartment overlooking the park where they first met, Paris shuts down for Covid. The two of them are trapped indefinitely together in this small space, and so, since they are both literary types, they decide to emulate the Decameron and tell each other stories on alternating nights-stories of their lives together and apart-as they try to figure out their future even as a 21st century plague passes by.