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A Novel
by Susan Minot
A mesmerizing new novel from the author of Evening: the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life.
Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel's beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence: On the surface she is a responsible mother, managing the demands of friends, an ex-husband, home; but emotionally, psychologically, sexually, she is consumed by desire and increasingly alive only in the stolen moments-out-of-time, with Ansel in her bed.
In spellbinding prose, Susan Minot has crafted a luminous novel about erotic obsession, and the hunger for intimacy, communication, oblivion. Don't Be a Stranger is agripping, sensual, and provocative work from one of the most remarkable voices in contemporary fiction.
"Minot exquisitely explores desire and denial, intimacy and illusion in aravishing, haunting, and insightful tale of sexual ecstasy and emotional torment, integrity andcreativity, self and motherhood." —Booklist (starred review)
"Spare and polished...Minot is an elegant writer, her sentences and paragraphs stylishly cropped, her dialogue quotation mark–free, her epigraphs chosen from classic sources: Rilke, Emerson, Lao Tzu, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Rumi. In pellucid prose she captures each of the emotional states Ivy cycles through on the roller coaster of erotic fascination, delusion, bliss, mania, devastation—while also buffeted by the emotions and responsibilities of motherhood and of a career as a writer." —Kirkus Reviews
"For a tale of unrequited obsession, the tone is appropriately melancholic, if a bit too one-note. There are glimmers of Minot's great early work, but this doesn't scale the same heights." —Publishers Weekly
"Susan Minot's writing is like a diamond knife on ice. Always has been." —Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
This information about Don't Be a Stranger was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.
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