{"id":3118,"date":"2025-07-12T02:34:05","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T02:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/3118\/"},"modified":"2025-07-12T02:34:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T02:34:05","slug":"where-to-start-with-elizabeth-strout-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/3118\/","title":{"rendered":"Where to start with: Elizabeth Strout | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

American author Elizabeth Strout<\/a> has captured millions of readers\u2019 imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with rich inner lives. Her novels \u2013 often set in Maine, where she grew up \u2013 have won her a Pulitzer and got her shortlisted for the Booker and, this year, the Women\u2019s prize for fiction. Joe Stone gives us a tour of her interconnected oeuvre.<\/p>\n

The one that deserves more attention<\/p>\n

Strout\u2019s first novel, Amy and Isabelle, introduces many of the themes which characterise her work. It\u2019s a close study of small-town life, exploring class, shame and the essential unknowability of others. When we meet anxious secretary Isabelle and her teenage daughter Amy, the claustrophobic domesticity in which they\u2019ve existed has recently been shattered. Amy has been seduced by her high-school maths teacher, which threatens to dismantle Isabelle\u2019s dearly held propriety and the decades-old secret it conceals. At once intricate and expansive, the novel introduced Strout\u2019s rare gift for uncovering the profound in the quotidian.<\/p>\n

The masterpiece<\/p>\n

While her first two novels were critically lauded, it was Olive Kitteridge \u2013 which won the Pulitzer prize and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand \u2013 that established Strout as a singular talent. A novel told in 13 short stories, it centres on Olive, one of fiction\u2019s most endearing and infuriating creations. Prone to displaying extraordinary compassion to strangers, but incapable of thanking her gentle husband for a bunch of ugly flowers, Olive charges through the world at once trenchant in her own righteousness and bewildered by her inability to understand the motives of others (most significantly, her son Christopher, who she loves with a fierceness that drives him away).<\/p>\n

Frances McDormand as Olive Kitteridge and Richard Jenkins as her husband Henry. Photograph: HBO<\/p>\n

The resulting missed human connections have heartbreaking, funny and thrilling consequences \u2013 memorably when Olive responds to a slight from her daughter-in-law by defacing one of her sweaters with magic marker and stealing a shoe in the hope that she\u2019ll believe she\u2019s losing her mind (somehow, we cheer her on). At one point, studying an old photo of her husband, Olive thinks \u201cYou will marry a beast, and love her.\u201d Is she a beast? She certainly can be. But we love her.<\/p>\n

The fan favourite<\/p>\n

All of Strout\u2019s novels are fan favourites, but My Name is Lucy Barton marks the first in her Amgash series (named after the fictional Illinois town where much of the action takes place), and introduces characters who feature in four subsequent novels.<\/p>\n

The book is presented as the memoir of its titular character, reflecting on a period years earlier, when her taciturn mother visited her during a lengthy hospital stay. Their oblique conversations, and Lucy\u2019s dreamlike recollections, paint a dismal portrait of her impoverished, isolated childhood. Over five days, the pair share anecdotes about figures from their past, but it is the gaps in their conversation that prove most revealing \u2013 they don\u2019t discuss Lucy\u2019s father\u2019s brutalities or her mother\u2019s inability to tell her she loves her. It is within these vibrating silences that Lucy attempts to untangle a very imperfect kind of love, and reconcile her current life with the beginnings she transcended.<\/p>\n

The page-turner<\/p>\n

Strout\u2019s books are not exactly thrillers. Readers come to her for her authorial voice and unsentimental insights into the human condition, and her work is more concerned with theme than plot. Much of her gift lies in her ability to expose the profundity in ordinary lives. Still, there are inciting incidents: affairs, suicides and the occasional armed robbery. Tell Me Everything incorporates a murder mystery \u2013 attorney Bob Burgess (who first appeared in Strout\u2019s fourth book, The Burgess Boys, and who we are told has a big heart \u201cbut did not know that about himself\u201d) is called to defend a reclusive man accused of murdering his mother.<\/p>\n

It also features a will-they-won\u2019t-they romance between Bob and Lucy Barton. This intertextual element is another joy of Strout\u2019s work. Many of her books contain the same characters, all living in Crosby, Maine, and crossing paths in unexpected ways, making her work the literary equivalent of The Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Tell Me Everything, characters from all of Strout\u2019s previous novels coalesce \u2013 most excitingly when Lucy is summoned for an audience with Olive Kitteridge (Olive\u2019s initial verdict? \u201cMeek-and-mousy\u201d). After this shaky start, the pair continue meeting to discuss the \u201cunrecorded lives\u201d of people they have known, and grapple with one of the central questions of Strout\u2019s work: what does anyone\u2019s life mean?<\/p>\n

The one that will cheer you up<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps strange to describe Anything Is Possible as cheerful; one review billed it as \u201ca requiem for small town pain\u201d. This 2017 novel, told in interlinked stories, is a companion to 2016\u2019s My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was written at the same time. It features a wellspring of dark themes; chiefly, the legacies of childhood trauma. One story, Sister, sees Lucy Barton reunited with her estranged siblings, and reveals the true horror of their upbringing, lightly sketched in the earlier book.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, the Nicely sisters are still metabolising the shame of their mother\u2019s affair, and her subsequent defection from the family, decades earlier. For Linda, this sense of abandonment has curdled into something sinister, and she colludes with her husband to spy on female house guests. It\u2019s perhaps Strout\u2019s most macabre story.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Linda\u2019s sister, nicknamed \u201cFatty Patty\u201d by the students she acts as a guidance counsellor for, is rendered leaden by the weight of her unexpressed love. As for the cheer? This gloom is punctuated by shimmers of grace, and reprieve arrives in unlikely forms. Patty finds her own struggles both dignified and understood by the memoir Lucy has written, and her quiet communion with traumatised Vietnam vet Charlie hints at a more substantive redemption. \u201cLove was the skin that protected you from the world,\u201d she decides.<\/p>\n

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout is out now in paperback (Viking). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"American author Elizabeth Strout has captured millions of readers\u2019 imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-3118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}