Evening - Paperback

by Susan Minot (Author)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A rich testament to the depths of passion and grief, this "exquisite [and] beautifully realized work" (The Boston Globe) explores time, memory, and love's transcendence.

"In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain."--The New York Times Book Review (Best Books of the Year)

July 1954. Ann Grant--a twenty-five-year-old New York career girl--is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding on an island off the coast of Maine. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . .

After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies dying in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes up to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend forty years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life.

Front Jacket

With two novels and one short story collection published to overwhelming critical acclaim ("Monkeys takes your breath away," said Anne Tyler; "heartbreaking, exhilarating," raved the "New York Times Book Review), Susan Minot has emerged as one of the most gifted writers in America, praised for her ability to strike at powerful emotional truths in language that is sensual and commanding, mesmerizing in its vitality and intelligence. Now, with Evening, she gives us her most ambitious novel, a work of surpassing beauty. During a summer weekend on the coast of Maine, at the wedding of her best friend, Ann Grant fell in love. She was twenty-five. Forty years later--after three marriages and five children--Ann Lord finds herself in the dim claustrophobia of illness, careening between lucidity and delirium and only vaguely conscious of the friends and family parading by her bedside, when the memory of that weekend returns to her with the clarity and intensity of a fever-dream. Evening unfolds in the rushlight of that memory, as Ann relives those three vivid days on the New England coast, with motorboats buzzing and bands playing in the night, and the devastating tragedy that followed a spectacular wedding. Here, in the surge of hope and possibility that coursed through her at twenty-five--in a singular time of complete surrender--Ann discovers the highest point of her life. Superbly written and miraculously uplifting, Evening is a stirring exploration of time and memory, of love's transcendence and of its failure to transcend--a rich testament to the depths of grief and passion, and a stunning achievement.

Author Biography

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 bestseller and became a major motion picture. She lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.