Excerpt from The American Lover by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Beth replied that she didn't care what the world thought. She was rich and she was going to live. She was going to live so fast, there would be no moment in any part of the day or night to remember Thaddeus. She would crush him under the weight of her new existence.

She went to St-Tropez, to redesign the garden of her house. She drank most nights until she passed out and slept sometimes with a beach lifeguard called Jo-Jo, who liked to stare at pornographic magazines in the small hours.

The garden progressed. In a shaded area of Corsican pines, Beth built a temple, which she filled with an enormous daybed, hung with soft white linen. She spent a long time lying on this daybed alone, drinking, smoking, watching the sea breezes take the pines unaware.

News came from Beatrice that The American Lover had been sold in five more countries. A Swedish director wanted to turn it into a film. An Icelandic composer was writing The American Lover Symphony. Pirated copies had reached The Soviet Union and a young Russian writer called Vassily wrote to say he was writing a sequel to the novel, in which Bradley would be executed by a KGB agent in Volgograd. This, he wrote, will be a very violent death, very terrible, very fitting to this bad man, and I, Vassily will smuggle this decadent book out of Russia to the USA and it will become as famous as your book and I will be rich and live in Las Vegas.

In this cold, dark winter of 1974, Beth spends more and more time looking at her press file. There is not one picture of Thaddeus in it. He is the missing third dimension in a twodimensional world. Beth's vacant face, caught in the white glare of photographers' flashbulbs, looks more and more exhausted with the search for something that is always out of sight.

She can remember this: how she looked for Thaddeus in Iceland, in shabby, raucous nightclubs, in hotel dining rooms, in the crowd of tourists congregating at a hot spring. Later, she searched for him in Canada, on the cold foreshore of Lake Ontario, in a brand-new shopping mall, in the publisher's smart offices, on the precipice of Niagara Falls. And then in New York, where, finally she went and was fêted like a movie star, she kept finding him. He was at a corner table in Sardi's. He was standing alone in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. He was in Greenwich Village, walking a poodle. He was buying a silk scarf in Bloomingdale's. He was lying on a bench in Central Park. He was among the pack of photographers at her book launch.

She thinks that he came back to her so strongly there, in America, because of all the voices that sounded like his. And one evening, as she was crossing Lexington Avenue, she heard yet another of these voices and she stumbled and fell down, slayed by her yearning for him. The man she was with, a handsome gallery owner of Persian origin, assumed she was drunk (she was often drunk) and hurled her into the first cab he could flag down and never saw her again.

She sat in the back of the cab like a dead person, unable to move. The sound of the cab's engine reminded her of the motor launch Thaddeus had once hired on the Seine. The day had been so fine that Thaddeus had taken off his shirt and she had put her arms round his thin torso and stroked his chest hair. And the ordinariness of him, the way he tried so hard and did so much with this fragile, unremarkable frame of his, had choked her with a feeling that was not quite admiration and not quite pity, but which bound her to him more strongly than she had ever been bound, as though her arms were bandages.

In the screeching New York night, Beth wondered whether, after all, after living so hard to forget him, she wouldn't fly to California and stand on the beach in front of his house at dawn, waiting until he got up and came to her.

She imagined that when he came to her, they would stand very still, holding on to one another and the sighing of the ocean would soothe them into believing that time had captured them in some strange, forgiving embrace.

Excerpted from The American Lover by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Tremain. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.