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Escapism begins as fantasy, a desire to forget the tedium and problems of the everyday. But sometimes it can take you to a place more menacing than the one you are trying to escape. It is escapism that leads Chris, a fortysomething traveling salesman trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage, to a street corner in north London. There, he propositions Roza, an illegal Yugoslav immigrant in her 20s, who has donned a short skirt and fur jacket merely to see what trouble she can stir. She invites him to her dingy basement apartment for coffee and starts telling him about her life as the daughter of a communist partisan. They forge a friendship, with Chris visiting Roza often to listen to her tales of the mundane (pets, first loves and summer camp) and the sensational — war, incest and rape. "I don't know why I am telling you all this," says Roza. "It's not important, it's just memories."

Memories — with their power to seduce, to reinvent, to torment — are what fuel A Partisan's Daughter, Louis de Bernières's quiet yet moving new novel set in London in 1979, during the strikebound Winter of Discontent. As recounted by Chris years later, it's an aching tale of love and loss in which the protagonists embody the profound but fragile relationships strangers can build and the pain of intimacy corrupted. "A previous draft was about sexual obsession, and it left a rather bad taste in the mouth," says De Bernières, who grew up in Surrey, just south of London, and now lives on a farm in Norfolk on England's east coast. "I rewrote it as a love story."

Best known for the romantic World War II epic Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which has sold more than 3 million copies in the U.K. alone, De Bernières in A Partisan's Daughter departs from what he describes as his usual "complicated, Latinate" writing style. He allows Roza and Chris to alternate in telling their stories, using their own raw and candid language. As a result, the novel reads like a memoir, which is fitting since De Bernières says Roza is the literary incarnation of a Serbian housemate he lived with in the late '70s. "When I left that house I heard her voice going through my mind for months," he recalls, "and I wrote all her stories down."

As in his seven previous books, De Bernières uses history to define his central characters. In 1979, the U.K. was mired in economic gloom, and he maps the bleakness of that time directly onto Chris's personality. A hopeless dullard who watches youth movements sweep the world but pass him by, Chris represents the mediocrity of a time and place in which trash lined the streets and protesting cemetery workers refused to bury the dead. "His psychological state is very like everybody's in 1979 when the country seemed to be going nowhere," says De Bernières. "It didn't have a future and there was no sense of optimism."

But Roza gives Chris the adventure he craves, her stories sparking what he calls a "buzzing in my groin." She speaks of her tough upbringing in Belgrade with her one-eyed father, a decorated communist hero who cut off the fingers of several Croats. She becomes the counterpoint to everything middle-class and politically correct, comparing Albanians to apes and taunting Chris with accounts of her sexual exploits. He breathes in every detail as fodder for his fantasies. "I only wanted to sleep with her, really, but when you're fascinated by a woman you'll settle for her stories," he says. Roza, in turn, feeds off of his fascination: "I could see he was happy admiring my body and listening to my voice. I liked it because it made me feel like a hot girl."

The solace the characters seek in one another slowly blurs into something deeper, obscuring the lines between lust and love. De Bernières uses their emotional confusion to comment on the power of storytelling, and its effects on the storyteller. Roza begins to worry that Chris will lose interest in her, so her stories grow ever more fanciful: in one, she gains passage on a ship by seducing the captain with her cooking. It's a tension that reflects De Bernières' friendship with the real Roza, who vanished from his life three decades ago: "Even today I'm not actually sure whether or not her stories were true."

Ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's made clear from the start that Chris and Roza's relationship will not last — and their separation resonates with the sorrow of what could have been. That regret keeps Roza in Chris' life, but only as a character in his story. Memories aren't important, Roza once told him. But in the end, they are all he has left.

• WILLIAM LEE ADAMS
• A new novel by Louis de Bernières looks back longingly at the brief spark of a dead-end relationship