Don't Be a Stranger: A Novel

by Susan Minot

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A story of obsession, lust and life, perfect for fans of All Fours by Miranda July.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593688489
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/28/2025
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.19(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.62(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

2024-07-10
A middle-aged New York writer loses herself to romantic obsession with a handsome musician.

Loving someone who doesn’t love you is bad. Everyone in Ivy Cooper’s life keeps telling her that, and at 52, divorced from the father of her young son, now fixated on a younger man named Ansel Fleming who explicitly rejects any possibility of commitment from day one, she doesn’t really need to be told. And it doesn’t matter anyway because she’s a goner, as fatally obsessed as any bunny-boiling love addict in life or literature. 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. While its individual parts are spare and polished, as a whole the book is ungainly. It’s divided into three sections, each of which has three chapters. The last section, which occurs after we have the sense that we already know everything we need to know, begins with an overly arty chapter about seeking help in “the rooms”—the Brown Room, Pink Room, Red Room, White Room, etc.—revealed to be a therapist’s office, yoga studio, 12-step meeting room, movie theater, lecture hall. In the next chapter, Ivy’s son has a brush with a very serious illness, an inherently suspenseful topic, but which at this point raises the question, “What are we doing here?” When the final chapter begins with, “She felt she ought to be at the end of this by now. She looked back and saw that what she had thought was close to the end was more like only halfway through the middle,” it’s almost as if author and reader are sharing a private joke.

Almost as painful to read about as it is to experience, which is both a complaint and a compliment.

Kirkus Reviews