Susan Minot

"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...

Now ailing and surrounded by her children, sixty-five-year-old Ann Grant Lord reminisces about a glorious summer weekend some forty years earlier during which she met and lost the love of her life.

Twelve stories of women caught in the emotional turbulence of romance in Manhattan. For the twelve narrators of Susan Minot's breathtaking collection - artists and lawyers, teenagers and thirty-somethings - love in New York doesn't come easy. And as they struggle to reconcile their yearnings for romance with their needs for independence, they face resistance to emotional commitment at every turn. In intense snapshots of these women's most intimate...

"A superb collection of short fiction--her first in thirty years and spanning many geographies--from the critically acclaimed author of Monkeys, Evening, and Thirty Girls A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through protests in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril;...

"A nineteen year old girl spends the summer in Italy, determined to fulfill two dreams. The first, to consummate the romance with the Italian boy she fell in love with four years earlier, and the second, to discover the identity of her father through clues in her mother's diary." --