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    Evening
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    Evening
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    Evening
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Evening

    Written by Susan Minot

    Narrated by Kathryn Walker

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 1, 2007
    ISBN9780739344095
    Unavailable
    Evening
    Author

    Susan Minot

    Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter, author of ‘Monkeys’, ‘Lust and Other Stories’, ‘Evening’ and ‘Rapture’. Her first novel, ‘Monkeys’, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel ‘Evening’ was a worldwide bestseller and became a major motion picture. She lives with her daughter in New York City and Maine.

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    Reviews for Evening

    3.5/5

    192 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Liked the prose and the looking-back-on-a-life emotion...
    • 3/5
      This is the story of a woman dying of cancer. It takes place mostly in her mind and memories, as she relives the weekend where she first fell in love, as well as other, more disjointed, recollections.The book uses several devices to make the reader feel like s/he is in the woman's mind, including page-long stream of consciousness phrasings and quick jumps between pasts and the present. I appreciated what Minot was trying to do, but I found it difficult to read, both literally and figuratively.
    • 4/5
      Evening by Susan Minot; (4*)I enjoyed and appreciated this novel. It is about a woman suffering a lingering death and her transitioning out of this life. We share her thought processes as she goes through the dying stages. With her mind altering moments she wanders back to her youth and to happy times. Her focus is mainly on a young man whom she met at her best friend's wedding. They were drawn to one another by a mutual attraction and passion. But first loves rarely, if ever, last and this one is no exception. They are torn from each other but he has never left her mind nor her heart though the years have moved her through a life which many would see as fulfilling.I had a hard time putting Evening down. I was intrigued by this deep love that never amounted to anything and yet was her most treasured memory. It was both sad and nostalgic. One never loses true love. It's always there buried in our memory, to be taken out when one needs it most as Ann does when she is dying.
    • 3/5
      In 1955 Ann Grant attends the wedding of her best friend in Maine. During that fateful weekend she falls in love with a young doctor from Chicago. Fate works her magic and they consummate their love within hours of meeting each other. Forty-eight hours later the doctor’s fiancee arrives and tells her betrothed that she is carrying his child. He is torn between his love for Ann and his duty to his intended.Now at the end of her life Ann Grant Lord lies in her bed. She is dying from cancer and each day the pain gets worse. Her children from her three marriages gather round and keep a death vigil while Ann mentally slips back in time to that weekend in 1955 when she fell in love. Her memories of that weekend become mixed with memories of her three marriages and with the hallucinations brought on by the heavy pain medicines she is taking.This is an interesting book; highly imaginative in the way that it is written. The reader is taken on a roller-coaster ride through the mind of a dying woman who mentally reviews her life and still wonders what if she had married her young Chicago doctor. Throughout the narrative she is speaking to a male entity – it is never clear if that person is at her bedside in substance or only in spirit. We are led to believe that it is her young beau from 1955. She relives that fateful weekend in great detail although the memories are mixed with memories of other men (her three husbands) and other places she has been. Her children are the buzzards circling her deathbed. Nurse Brown is the voice of reason who writes her reports on her patient in a clinical manner that is much needed after the ramblings of the elderly Ann.For me this book gave insight into the final days and hours of a person who has accepted her fate, knows she is about to die, and embraces the end. Everything else is secondary. A thought-provoking story that I finished in under a week.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed how the style of the writing changed based on where you were in Ann's life. I almost felt like I could "see" what Ann was feeling. A great read! I plan on watching the movie now to compare!
    • 2/5
      Perhaps if thre wern't so many books out there to read, I owould have forced myself to finish this and I might have found it better than 2 stars. As far as i got though, it was confusing and seemed somewhat mundane. A women lays dying and remembers snippets of her life. Very difficult to read due to jumps in time.
    • 5/5
      I found this novel quite remarkable as it depicts the thought process of Ann Lord. She is on her deathbed and slipping in and out of memories about events of her life. The main memory is of a brief love affair she had at 25, obviously an experience that has remianed with her through multiple husbands and 5 children. There is a stream of consciousness to the writing and the detail seems right on. The New York Times description below does a nice job of summarizing :"July 1954. An island off the coast of Maine. Ann Grant—a 25-year-old New York career girl—is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . .After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend 40 years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life. In Evening, Susan Minot gives us a novel of spellbinding power on the nature of memory and love." What is not mentioned in the summary is the images she creates in her writing and the unique point of view, depicting a woman's thoughts as she struggles in and out of a drug induced coma. Highly recommended. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    • 4/5
      Whatever We May Think of at the End of LifeThis was truly a striking story. I didn’t like it much at first, but as I continued reading I saw there was something beautiful being realized. I had a good feeling after I finished reading it – I enjoyed the story and admire Susan Minot’s confidence to write a novel in this way – her loose, rambling style captured the subconscious mind.It’s true that this is a sprawling story which was sometimes hard to follow but I think that often, that’s the way memories get tangled up at the end of life after an illness. It gives the reader an inside view of dying, which is very thought-provoking. I’m intrigued to see the movie and to see how their treatment affects the plot and storyline.
    • 4/5
      Interesting book. Lots of characters and sometimes difficult to follow the switching back and forth. As I understand it the movie did follow the book very carefully.
    • 5/5
      I loved this the first time I read it several years ago, and wanted to re-read it before I saw the movie. I loved it just as much this time.