"An absorbing, intelligent novel" (Washington Post Book World) about a marriage in decline--from the celebrated author of The Romance Reader.In her "remarkable first novel" (Entertainment Weekly), Pearl Abraham "deftly lift[ed] the opaque curtain from the closed Hasidic world" (New York Times Book Review). Now she tells the poignant story of a marriage cracking and collapsing under the weight of conflicting faiths. Deena's father, a Hasidic scholar, opposes her marriage to the non-Hasidic Daniel based on Kabbalistic interpretations--but Deena ignores her father's prediction and she and Daniel begin to renovate their dream house in Brooklyn. When Daniel brings a beautiful Gentile coworker home from the office one day, their subsequent three-way friendship--and the betrayals it breeds--leads Deena to contemplate where her true home lies, and how far she is willing to travel to find it."Her prose is sparse and exacting."--New York Times Book Review"Whether one is falling in love or out of it, the transition is mysterious. Giving Up America, the story of a young couple in New York whose marriage begins changing for the worse, does full justice to that mystery."--The San Francisco Chronicle"In spare prose, with painstaking attention to quotidian detail, the book magnifies the anticlimactic dissipation of love and unflinchingly dissects the familiar, and often irreconcilable, tension between commitment and self-realization, daily partnership and romantic fantasy...a page-turner."--Ms.