Time, death and desire are main themes in Minot's work. Sexuality and relationships, romantic and familial, are explored. Her second book, Lust & Other Stories, focuses on "the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart".[8] Reviewing her novella Rapture in The Atlantic Monthly, James Marcus wrote, "Sex and the single girl have seldom been absent from Susan Minot's fiction",[9] and Dave Welch at Powells.com identifies one of Minot's themes as "the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart".[10] Of Lust, Jill Franks wrote that Minot
begins with short, simple sentences, building gradually to longer ones to create the inevitable conclusion: men don't love like women do.
In Folly, a Bostonian woman of privileged background is involved with two different men as she tries to find equilibrium with her society and family in the era between the world wars. Evening is the story of a woman on her deathbed looking back over her life and returning to a wedding weekend 40 years earlier when she fell in love and certain paths in her life were decided. It was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Thirty Girls is the story of two women: a Ugandan girl of 15 who has escaped from living two years with armed bandits of the LRA led by Joseph Kony, and an American writer, traveling with free spirits on a journalist trip to Uganda to report on the story of the abducted children.[11]
