Evening

By Jill Smolowe

As Ann Lord, 65, lies withering from cancer, aware that death is near, the memory that floats back is not from any of her three marriages. Rather, it is of Lord's first love, a passionate affair with a young doctor that lasted only the length of a friend's weekend wedding festivities. While Lord's four children maintain a death watch, she relives every minute of that fateful weekend and encounters snippets of memory from other points in her life that flesh out the affair's consequences. In her powerful third novel Susan Minot mesmerizes with her convincing evocation of Lord's final semiconscious state, wherein time and place crisscross, the lines between real and imagined blur, and the difference between resignation and regret is indistinguishable.

--By Jill Smolowe