Not a Day Goes By: A Novel - Softcover

Harris, E. Lynn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 038549825X ISBN 13: 9780385498258

Publisher: Anchor, 2001

Synopsis

E. Lynn Harris's latest blockbuster bestseller brings together two characters who truly deserve each other and lets us watch the sexual pyrotechnics fly.

John "Basil" Henderson has always played the field, both as a professional football player and as an equal opportunity lover. After retiring his jersey for a thriving career as a sports agent, the dashing playboy is finally settling down, and getting married to his new love, Yancey Harrington Braxton. A fiercely driven, emerging Broadway star, blessed with radiant beauty and inimitable charm, Yancey would seem his ideal counterpart. But she is also an insatiable opportunist with a vicious streak, and when Yancey joins forces with her unconscionable mother, and unearths Basil's most carefully guarded secrets, she finds herself with more than she bargained for. Charged with narrative exuberance and lavish detail, Not A Day Goes By is further proof that nobody spins a sexy urban love story quite like award-winning writer E. Lynn Harris.

About this title

Review

Set in New York in the closing months of 1999, E. Lynn Harris's tightly plotted Not a Day Goes By bears all the outward markers of a romance by Danielle Steel or Jackie Collins--wealth, glamour, sex, and intrigue--except that the two main characters are more like the wily villains of a Dynasty remake. John "Basil" Henderson, a former football player who has started a successful sports agency with a friend, is a gorgeous, arrogant, bitter, woman-hating, homophobic, African American bisexual who is used to people staring at him. "Especially when I was naked," Basil confides, "My ass was perfect and my jimmie was both long and thick." Basil has fallen in love with an equally alluring figure, Yancey Braxton, a bronze-skinned Broadway singer whose beauty and dedication are matched by ferocious self-absorption and cunning. (Instead of attending her 10-year high school reunion, Yancey sent signed photos of herself and press packets.) Basil feels that his love has rescued him from the shallow life of a player, and he allows himself to believe that she is a good person, and that when they marry, she'll settle down a little and provide him with children. Yancey cares for Basil, too, but her career comes first. After that, sex and money. Babies aren't even on the list.

Harris's most sympathetic characters are Yancey's roommate, Windsor, a plump schoolteacher who spends her spare evenings holding abandoned babies at Hale House, and Zurich Robinson, a gay Christian ex-athlete who briefly considers joining Basil's agency, eliciting a string of ugly clichés from Basil's partner. Meanwhile, Basil, that pillar of integrity, listens in silence. The deal is scotched when Zurich announces that he has been interviewed for an article on gay men in professional athletics. When Basil asks him why he is coming out, Zurich tells him about another young quarterback who tried to run from his sexuality by getting married. The day of the wedding, he shot himself. "As Zurich told the story," Basil recounts,

I could picture the young man and for a brief moment felt the pain he was struggling with. I had been there. But it had never gotten to the point where I wanted to kill myself. If I could have talked to Milo I would have told him, "Roll with it young brother.... There is a way to have your cake and ice cream, too."

Suffice it to say that after a series of delicious plot twists and acts of increasing wickedness, it becomes clear that Basil and Yancey are too damaged to save each other. Although the characters in his sixth novel are somewhat two dimensional and his prose a little flat, E. Lynn Harris can manipulate a story line with the skill of an Eagle Scout earning his badge in knotmaking. Don't start this page-turner if you don't have six or seven free hours in which to read it straight through. --Regina Marler

From the Back Cover

“A book that plumbs the depths of love, loyalty and misplaced motives.... Harris is in true form.”–USA Today

“Offers sweet, guilty thrills that leave you longing for more.” –Salon

“E. Lynn Harris...tucks in enough plot twists to keep his readers turning pages late at night.”–The Washington Post Book World

“Harris scores again.... His patented knack for a wry, uproarious resolution is in full flower in this sexual War of the Roses.”–Publishers Weekly

“A love story full of suspense and anticipation.”–Detroit Free Press

“Enough punch to score a KO.”–People

“E. Lynn Harris–the chart-topping author of romance novels about black men–has got it going on.... The secret? Harris’ addictive, Soul Food meets Melrose Place plots, revolving around affluent buppies wrestling with sexual identity, monogamy, and top-flight careers.”–Entertainment Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 038549825X
• ISBN 13: 9780385498258
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276