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.
Don’t Be a Stranger is a gripping, sensual, and provocative work from one of the most remarkable voices in contemporary fiction.
“Minot is an O.G. writer of female desire who published the spare and potent “Lust and Other Stories” in 1989, when July was still in knee socks and Sally Rooney just a glimmer in Mr. Rooney’s eye. Its neon-lettered cover blazed from every cool girl’s bookshelf.”
“‘Don’t Be a Stranger’ shows how powerfully transformative a sexual entanglement can be for a woman starved for sensation and attention. And how a lover’s approach-avoidance behavior can curdle pleasure into obsession.”
Reviews
“Friends with Benefits, but Without Illusions” (The New York Times, October 2024)
“The Women's Midlife-Crisis Novel Enters The Season of the Witch” (The New Yorker, October 2024 )
“Susan Minot Plumbs the Terrifying Depths of Erotic Obsession” (The Boston Globe, October 2024 )
The B&N Podcast: Susan Minot on DON’T BE A STRANGER (Poured, Over October 2024)
