Don't Be a Stranger: A Novel(Vintage Contemporaries)

A mesmerizing new novel from the author of Evening: the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life

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.

In spellbinding prose, Susan Minot has crafted a luminous novel about erotic obsession, and the hunger for intimacy, communication, oblivion. 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 in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.

Review :
“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