Book Description
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 herat 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.
