Susan Minot, Don’t Be a Stranger, and Andrea di Robilant, This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

• Books & Literature

Two authors and friends discuss their books and the writing life, in conversation with poet and editor Deborah Garrison.

Susan Minot’s new novel tells the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life, a luminous tale about erotic obsession and the hunger for intimacy, communication, and oblivion.

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.