Alla fine della sua vita, dopo tre matrimoni, quattro gravidanze, un divorzio, due vedovanze e la morte di un figlio, Ann Lord si rende conto di aver ostinatamente perseguito la rimozione di un suo fugace innamoramento del 1954, quando aveva appena venticinque anni, in un'isola del Maine. Un evento all'apparenza minuscolo, ma che per Ann Lord è stato decisivo, il momento più alto della sua intera esistenza. Offuscata dai farmaci, sul letto di morte, Ann decide di ripercorrere quel lontano fine settimana del 1954, quando in occasione delle nozze della sua migliore amica, conobbe Harris Arden, un giovane e affascinante medico di Chicago, di cui si innamorò senza riserve ed esitazioni. Un amore fisico e spirituale che ai suoi occhi doveva rappresentare le fondamenta su cui costruire un'esistenza autentica e ricca di opportunità. Un amore nato e cresciuto tra passeggiate sulla spiaggia, nuotate nell'acqua del Maine, risate di gruppo, conversazioni allusive, viaggi in barca a vela, ricevimenti di nozze, e la musica di Duke Ellington.

Una giovane studentessa universitaria alle prese con le molestie di un professore istrionico; la notte d'amore di una documentarista americana nel cottage di un giornalista kenyano; una madre single a Zuccotti Park durante il movimento di Occupy Wall Street; un ragazzo adolescente violentato da una donna misteriosa; una coppia stremata dalle gelosie reciproche. Sono questi alcuni dei protagonisti della raccolta di racconti di Susan Minot, un'esplorazione attenta e originale in particolare del complicato rapporto tra donna e uomo all'interno di relazioni sentimentali straordinarie e ordinarie, nelle quali emergono gli entusiasmi ma anche le ipocrisie, le toccanti devozioni ma anche le insopportabili esibizioni di forza. Ma per Minot l'esame delle complesse geometrie umane è anche l'occasione per ragionare sul valore della memoria come esperienza ripetuta e nuova, sul senso dell'impegno politico, sulla irrisolvibile ambiguità del quotidiano, oscillando continuamente tra le ragioni dell'individuo e quelle della collettività, tra il personale e il politico, in una tensione costante verso l'amore e nella costante ricerca di senso e di legami. Legami autentici, per quanto ai protagonisti di questi racconti appaia spesso difficile, se non impossibile, tracciarne con precisione i contorni.

I Vincent hanno le abitudini di una prestigiosa famiglia del New England e, allo stesso tempo, la soffocante intimità di una famiglia larghissima in cui spiccano i sette figli: Caitlin, Sophie, Delilah, Gus, Sherman, Chicky e Minnie. Dodici anni di vita familiare, tra il 1966 e il 1978, che Minot racconta attraverso scene di apparente normalità domestica, e che invece preludono a tragedie, in un confronto costante e doloroso tra freddezza e affetto, tra equilibrio e conflitti, tra senso di appartenenza e ricerca della propria individualità. Parzialmente autobiografico, questo ciclo narrativo racconta anche il radicarsi nei membri più giovani della famiglia di una dolorosa consapevolezza: le vite degli adulti sono, da una parte, più misteriose e ingarbugliate del previsto e, dall'altra, insincere. Questa consapevolezza ha però un pregio, ed è quello di suscitare tra i fratelli un senso di solidarietà, complicità e soprattutto tenerezza, che consentirà loro di trovare la forza per affrontare le tante ferite emotive.

Esther Akello is one of thirty Ugandan teenage girls abducted from a Catholic boarding school by rebel bandits. Held captive by the Lord’s Resistance Army, Esther is forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities. She is struggling to survive, to escape, and to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane Wood is a sensual, idealistic American writer who is traveling across Africa, hoping to give a voice to young people like Esther and to find her own center.
In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves the stories of these two astonishing young women who, as they confront displacement and heartbreak, are hurtled inexorably closer to one another. With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa’s horror and beauty, Susan Minot gives us her most brilliant novel yet.

The long-awaited novel from the best-selling, award-winning author of Evening is a literary tour de force set in war-torn Africa.

Esther is a Ugandan teenager abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army and forced to witness and commit unspeakable atrocities, who is struggling to survive, to escape, and to find a way to live with what she has seen and done. Jane is an American journalist who has traveled to Africa, hoping to give a voice to children like Esther and to find her center after a series of failed relationships. In unflinching prose, Minot interweaves their stories, giving us razor-sharp portraits of two extraordinary young women confronting displacement, heartbreak, and the struggle to wrest meaning from events that test them both in unimaginable ways.

With mesmerizing emotional intensity and stunning evocations of Africa's beauty and its horror, Minot gives us her most brilliant and ambitious novel yet.

The setting is a New York apartment where two long-estranged lovers try to resuscitate their passion. Kay is old enough to be skeptical about men–this man in particular–but still alert to the possibility of true love. Benjamin is a filmmaker with an appealing waywardness and a conveniently disappearing fiancée. As the two lie entwined in bed, Susan Minot ushers readers across an entire landscape of memory and sensation to reveal the infinite nuances of sex: its power to exalt and deceive, to connect two separate selves or make them fully aware of their solitude. Honest and unflinching, the result is a hypnotic reading experience.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

In this luminous story of family life--the first novel by Susan Minot, author of the highly acclaimed Evening--the seven Vincent children follow their Catholic mother to Mass and spend Thanksgiving with their father's aging parents who come from a world of New England priviledge. As they grow older, they meet with the perplexing lives of adults. Susan Minot writes with delicacy and a tremendous gift for the details that decorate domestic life, and when tragedy strikes she beautifully mines the children's tenderness for each other, and their aching guardianship of what they have.

The author of Monkeys and Evening focuses her observant eye and lyrical voice on the delicate emotional negotiations of young New Yorkers.  As in a series of deceptively simple watercolors, these stories uncover small moments that yield larger truths--about the ways in which women and men come together and come apart again, about the disappointments and hopes of lovers who know what they want but don't always know how to keep.  A deeply poignant meditation on the nature of desire and loss.

1. For discussion 2. Minot gives the novel an epigraph from William Faulkner: 'I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.' How does this quotation relate to Evening ? Does Ann try to 'conquer' time? 3. Minot renders Ann's thoughts in what might be called stream-of-consciousness. Which things does Ann remember most distinctly? Which does she remember least distinctly? Which does she repress? What does the relative weight she allows each memory tell us about the emotional shape of her life? 4. Outsiders see Ann rather differently than she sees herself. Her daughter Constance, for instance, says that 'her big thing' is 'her stuff'; 'That's what she cared about, her house and her pictures and all her things' [p. 129]. Her daughters imply that she doesn't laugh much [p. 32]. The doctor's wife says Ann is 'just like other women, maybe a little more stylish if you had to say something, but like other women' [p. 12]. What, if anything, does this elderly Ann have in common with the young, passionate Ann she still feels herself to be? What does this dichotomy imply about the differences between our inner selves and the outer person our friends and family see? 5. What might have attracted Ann to each of her three husbands? How did she come to view each of them as the years went by? How does the language in which Ann recalls her marriages differ from the language in which she recalls Harris, and what does this difference in language tell us about her feelings? 6. Ann wishes that she 'might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it' [p. 137], then goes on to reflect that 'her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide' [ibid]. In what ways has it not been wide enough? Does the fault for this lie with the cruelty of fate, or with Ann herself? If fault lies with Ann, what might she have done to make things different? 7. How would you describe each of Ann's children? How has each been molded and shaped by his or her relationship with her? How does each of them behave toward her? Has the essential sadness of Ann's life rubbed off on them? 8. How has Paul's death affected Ann, Teddy, and the other children? Has it made them closer, or estranged them from one another? How, and at what times, is Ann compelled to remember Paul? 9. What sort of a person is Harris, really? What do you deduce about him and about his feelings, principles, and desires from his behavior, from what others say about him, and from the short section written from his point of view [p. 232-233]? 10. In one of Ann's imaginary discussions with Harris, he says that she might have become a little 'hard' [page 224]. Does this seem a fair assessment, judging from what you know of the older Ann? If so, how does this hardness manifest itself and why has she become hard? 11. How does Minot thematically link Buddy's fate with the fate of Ann and Harris's romance? In what ways is this particular weekend the turning point in Ann's life, and how has Buddy's fate intensified this process of change? 12. Does Ann ever feel responsible for what happened to Buddy? Does Harris? Does a sense of responsibility for this tragedy, or a lack of one, have any specific effect on Ann's future life? 13. Ann conducts a number of imagined conversations with Harris in which the two meet again, for the first time in forty years. What sort of person is this elderly, imaginary Harris? Is he the sort of character you can imagine the young Harris growing into? How do you think the real sixty-five-year-old Harris might remember Ann? 14. If Ann and Harris had married, what sort of a life might they have had? Would they have been happy together? Might Ann have been unhappy and unfulfilled even with Harris? Suggestions for further reading Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac ; John Irving, A Widow for One Year ; William Kennedy, Ironweed ; Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger ; Alice McDermott, Charming Billy ; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day ; William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow ; Sue Miller, Family Picture , The Good Mother , While I Was Gone ; Alice Munro, Open Secrets ; Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient ; Philip Roth, American Pastoral ; Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres ; Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , A Patchwork Planet ; John Updike, Rabbit at Rest .

From the acclaimed writer Susan Minot, author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories, and Folly, and the legendary filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor (winner of nine Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture), The Sheltering Sky, and Little Buddha, comes a hauntingly beautiful film about innocence, seduction, and the pain and pleasures of youth.
Following the death of her mother, nineteen-year-old Lucy Harmon is sent by her father to Italy to stay with old family friends and to have her portrait done. She is eager to renew her acquaintance with Niccolo Donati, the handsome young boy from a neighboring family with whom she shared her first kiss on a visit years earlier, and anxious to solve a riddle left in her mother's diary - the answer to which may change Lucy's life forever.

At a time when the choosing of a husband determines a woman's life, Lilian Eliot must decide between cool comfort or hot, passionate romance