Evening - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Susan Minot (Paperback)

About the Book

Forty years after she travels to Maine to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of her best friend, Ann Lord lies dying, and what she remembers--what eclipses nearly all of the present and a good portion of the past--is that long-ago wedding weekend.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Her best work yet, assured, supple, exhilarating in its nerve and cool momentum."--Joan Didion

"A stunning novel . . . a powerful story that cuts back and forth in time to give us both the defining moment in a woman's life and an understanding of how that moment has reverberated through the remainder of her days . . . Her evocation of her heroine's passion for Harris Arden is so convincing, her depiction of the world she inhabits is so fiercely observed. . . . The difference between [Monkeys and Evening] attests to Susan Minot's growing ambition and assurance as an artist."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"An absorbing drama . . . Minot writes with quiet perceptiveness and grace, pulling the reader into Ann's deathbed reverie."--Elle

"A brilliant lyric performance."--John Casey

"In spare and lovely language, Susan Minot has set forth a real life, in all its particularity and splendor and pain. This is the task of the novelist, and in Evening Minot has succeeded admirably."--Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

"It astounds in its craftsmanship and imprints itself indelibly on the heart. . . . A haunting work of art that moves at the pace of a suspense thriller."--Sheila Bosworth, New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Evening is a beautifully realized work . . . more mature and confident than anything she has written . . . An exquisite novel."--Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

"A wonderful, truthful, heartbreaking book . . . Evening vindicates the wildest assertions any of us have made about Susan Minot's talent."--Tom McGuane

"Evening is a supremely sensual, sensitive, and dramatic novel. . . . So rich in color and motion, music and atmosphere."--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"I was swept up in it. . . . It moved me and made me cry."--D. T. Max, New York Observer

About the Author

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.