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.
