The Separation by Katie Kitamura

A wife has decided to ask her cheating husband for a divorce--but she doesn't know exactly where he is. His mother calls their house and tells the wife he has gone to Greece to do research on a book he's supposed to be writing--and that the wife must go to Greece immediately. The wife is dismayed that her mother in law knows the husband's travel plans down to the name of his hotel while she didn't even know that he was out of the country. But off she heads to Greece. She finds her husband's room and all his stuff but the concierge tells her that the husband hasn't been back to the hotel for a few days. So she decides to wait. After a few days of fruitless waiting in the mostly empty hotel--and finding out that her cheating husband has probably been cheating again--she decides to head back home to London, only to get news of her husband's whereabouts. And then things take some interesting turns.

Everything in this book seems to be shades of gray. We never learn the wife's name. And everyone --the wife, the husband, the mother in law, the girl working the front desk at the hotel--seems to have a lot of secrets. Questions arise that are never answered. And no one really seems to get much closure by the end of the book. Plus the setting is kind of bleak and claustrophobic. Normally when one thinks of Greece, one thinks of sunshine and blue skies. But this book is set in a rural part of Greece that has been besieged by wildfires, so everything around the hotel is burnt. There are wild dogs running around. There's graffiti on the walls of the local church. It's all kind of bleak and unsettling--
which I guess is befitting the end of a marriage.