Dont Be a Stranger, Susan Minot
Dont Be a Stranger, Susan Minot
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Don't Be a Stranger

Author: Susan Minot

Narrator: Susan Minot

Unabridged: 12 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/15/2024


Synopsis

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A mesmerizing new novel from the author of Evening: the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life • A luminous story about erotic obsession, the hunger for intimacy, communication, and oblivion that will appeal to readers of Miranda July's All Fours

“Minot exquisitely explores desire and denial, intimacy and illusion in a ravishing, haunting, and insightful tale of sexual ecstasy and emotional torment, integrity and creativity, self and motherhood.” —Booklist (starred review)

"Minot’s writing is like a diamond knife on ice.” —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize winning author

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.

Don't Be a Stranger is a gripping, sensual, and provocative work from one of the most remarkable voices in contemporary fiction.

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 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on December 03, 2024

There were parts of this story that made me sweat, pages that had me gasping, as I related to Ivy’s inability to end a toxic relationship with a handsome musician, Ansel, who is 18 years her junior. A therapist once told me that obsessive sexual love takes the same amount of time to get over it as t......more

Goodreads review by Dona's on November 13, 2024

Thank you to the author Susan Minot, publishers Penguin Books, and NetGalley for an advance digital copy of DON'T BE A STRANGER. All views are mine. Love exists below cognitive thinking, [the neuroscientist] said.... [...R]ejected love will stimulate the amygdala, the place one feels pleasure.p197......more

Goodreads review by *TUDOR^QUEEN* on August 24, 2024

3.5 Stars This was an interesting character study of a woman in her early fifties with a grammar school-aged son, a divorcee living in New York City. She had not been with a man in years, since leaving her ex-husband- until she was set up with a brooding musician almost twenty years younger. This ign......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on November 27, 2024

This was so frustrating to read but engrossing enough in paragraph-increments that I ended up at the end of the novel. First, Minot's writing was excellent. Sparse, poetic and decidedly not flowery. I enjoyed the writing very much, which can almost absolve the sins of this repetitive, circular plot.......more

Goodreads review by Emma on November 27, 2024

I didn’t like this book at first and that’s because I’ve had an Ansel Fleming. I think we have all had an Ansel Fleming. I can understand why people don’t get this book and maybe aren’t a fan.. I’m assuming most people do not have OCD and/or obsessive thoughts. I do, so I understood this book comple......more


Quotes

“Susan Minot’s writing is like a diamond knife on ice. Always has been.” —Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

"As she dependably has for some 35 years now, Minot once again uses her sharp fiction as a vehicle to explore female desire, staging a romantic collision between a divorced mother and a much younger musician. Rather than a book you 'can’t put down,' it’s one you might pause from precisely to prolong its mild suspense and poetic pleasures." The New York Times Book Review

“Minot exquisitely explores desire and denial, intimacy and illusion in a ravishing, haunting, and insightful tale of sexual ecstasy and emotional torment, integrity and creativity, 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