An immediate bestseller in France, Making Love is an original and daring retelling of a classic theme: the end of an affair. Following a couple's final days together in Japan, the novel explores the frustration of two lovers trying to break up with each other while on vacation, even as they go on a wild and intimate ramble through the streets of Tokyo.

Toussaint writes with an economy and restraint that invoke the distinct imagery of film while allowing a startling proximity to the feelings of his characters. In an extraordinary translation by Linda Coverdale, the result of vertiginous, standing traditional images on their head and transposing the conflict and confusion of lost intimacy onto the labyrinthine ultramodernism of Tokyo and Kyoto.