Elizabeth Strout

The narrative threads make for dishy small-town drama, but even more satisfying are the insights Strout weaves into the dialogue. Late in the novel, after Olive asks Lucy the point of writing stories, she responds, ‘People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.’ Longtime fans and newcomers alike will relish this.

Like all of Strout’s novels, Lucy by the Sea has an anecdotal surface that belies a firm underlying structure. It is meant to feel like life—random, surprising, occasionally lit with flashes of larger meaning—but it is art.

Heartwarming as well as somber . . . Although simple on the surface, Strout’s new novel manages, like her others, to encompass love and friendship, joy and anxiety, grief and grievances, loneliness and shame—and a troubling sense of growing unrest and division in America. . . . Strout’s understanding of the human condition is capacious.

[Strout] illuminates both what people understand about others and what they understand about themselves.

Strout managed to make me love this strange woman I’d never met, who I knew nothing about. What a terrific writer she is.

Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.

Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue.

Reading an Elizabeth Strout novel is like peering into your neighbor’s windows. . . . There is a nuanced tension in the novel, evoked by beautiful and detailed writing. Strout’s manifestations of envy, pride, guilt, selflessness, bigotry and love are subtle and spot-on.

Strout is a brilliant chronicler of the ambiguity and delicacy of the human condition.

Loneliness and betrayal, themes to which the Pulitzer Prize–winning Strout has returned throughout her career, are ever present in this illuminating character-driven saga… Strout’s characters teem with angst and emotion, all of which she handles with a mastery of restraint and often in spare, true sentences… It’s not for nothing that Strout has been compared to Hemingway. In some ways, she betters him.

Just as wonderful as the original….Here’s the thing about Strout: Her characters endure some awful stuff…but they’re resilient. And if even harshly opinionated Olive can learn that a little compassion can change the picture, so can we. ‘What is your life like, Betty?’ Olive asks a home health aide whose bumper sticker irks her. The question is key; it’s the first step toward empathy. Olive, Again poignantly reminds us that empathy, a requirement for love, helps make life ‘not unhappy.

The last book that made me cry…. What’s remarkable about that is that at the time I’d never read the first one, Olive Kitteridge. Strout managed to make me love this strange woman I’d never met, who I knew nothing about. What a terrific writer she is.

Strout’s world view emerges in plain-spoken, sometimes elegant, third-person prose: Human beings are fundamentally lonely creatures, further isolated by the rigors of aging. Families are emotional minefields. Death, dementia and other natural disasters lurk everywhere. Love, though precious, is elusive, prone to slip away almost before we realize its existence. The darkness of Strout’s vision is leavened by her belief in moments of grace, which may arrive in a slant of light, a sudden insight, or (best of all) a connection to another human being.

It is precisely the complicated mixture of emotions she inspires that makes Olive such an endlessly fascinating and irresistibly endearing heroine. ‘Olive, Again’ is bleaker, sadder, more achingly beautiful than its predecessor, and a magnificent achievement on its own terms…. we see Olive acquiring a view of herself, and coming to recognize as valuable the other people who grant that vision. In the process, she shares in the alchemy that she continues to perform for us and elicits our unexpected, abiding love.

“Strout dwells with uncanny immediacy inside the minds and hearts of a dazzling range of ages: the young (with their confusion, wonder, awakening sexuality), the middle-aged (envy, striving, compromise), the old (failing bodies, societal shunning, late revelations)…. I have long and deeply admired all of Strout’s work, but ‘Olive, Again’ transcends and triumphs. The naked pain, dignity, wit and courage these stories consistently embody fill us with a steady, wrought comfort.

Olive is a brilliant creation not only because of her eternal cantankerousness but because she’s as brutally candid with herself about her shortcomings as she is with others. Her honesty makes people strangely willing to confide in her, and the raw power of Ms. Strout’s writing comes from these unvarnished exchanges, in which characters reveal themselves in all of their sadness and badness and confusion…. The great, terrible mess of living is spilled out across the pages of this moving book. Ms. Strout may not have any answers for it, but she isn’t afraid of it either.

Olive Kitteridge, the deliciously funny and unforgettable miserabilist at the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 novel that bore her name, fully deserves the sensitive and satisfying follow-up that Strout has written about her…. Strout…is exquisitely attuned to the subtleties of her beloved character’s innermost thoughts; she makes us feel for Olive, giving us an intimate, multifaceted and touching portrait of someone suffering alone.

These stories return Strout to the core of what she does more magnanimously than anyone else, which is to render quiet portraits of the indignities and disappointments of normal life, and the moments of grace and kindness we are gifted in response… Strout hits the target yet again.

Strout really can write you into a world until you feel you are there with her… This is her genius… She is also simply superb at writing about relationships.

In this wise and accomplished book, pain and healing exist in perpetual dependence, like feuding siblings.

It’s hard to believe that a year after the astonishing My Name Is Lucy Barton Elizabeth Strout could bring us another book that is by every measure its equal, but what Strout proves to us again and again is that where she’s concerned, anything is possible. This book, this writer, are magnificent.

If you miss the charmingly eccentric and completely relatable characters from Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout’s best-selling My Name is Lucy Barton, you’ll be happily reunited with them in Strout’s smart and soulful Anything is Possible.

In Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible, her stunning follow-up to My Name is Lucy Barton, a famous author returns to the Midwestern hometown of her childhood, touching off a daisy-chain of stories narrated by those who knew her—memories of trauma and goodwill, resentments small and large, and the ever-widening gulf between haves and have-nots. Strout, always good, just keeps getting better.

There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to—‘I was so happy. Oh, I was happy’—simple joy.

In her lovely and heartbreaking new novel…Elizabeth Strout has produced a major work in minimalist form…In the character of Lucy, Strout has fashioned one of the great resilient modern heroines.

“[The novel is] potent with distilled emotion. Without a hint of self-pity, Strout captures the ached of loneliness we all feel sometimes, ‘with longings so large you can’t even weep.

Spectacular… My Name is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom… [Elizabeth Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.

[Strout’s] tender and moving novel should be read slowly, to savor the depths beneath what at first seems a simple story of a mother-daughter reconciliation…Her narrative voice is restrained yet expressive. This masterly novel’s message, made clear in the moving denouement, is that sometimes in order to express love, one has to forgive

"A unified cycle of finely observed tales focusing on characters inhabiting a single town...[a] brilliant evocation of emotion...a gratifying stunner."

Perceptive, deeply empathetic, and even more deeply flawed, Olive is the axis around which these 13 complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves in Elizabeth Strout's unforgettable novel in stories, Olive Kitteridge...This is the essence of Olive, contradictory, locked down tight, but capable of flights of emotion all the more beautiful because of their infrequency.

Wincingly funny, moving, wise.

[Strout’s] extraordinary narrative gifts are evident again…the distance between Bob and Jim — painfully wide at times, lovingly close as well and turning on ‘a terrible secret’ from childhood — gives the novel a level of intrigue and human depth with lasting impact. Strout's writing style is all her own, at times almost effortlessly fluid, with superbly rendered dialogue, sudden and unexpected bolts of humor and, just as a scene seems to be low-key, carried away by startling riffs of gripping emotion…. Strout knows and vividly evokes the territory of Maine and New York City, her characters, their inner lives and fears and — beyond the saga of a family in crisis — the healing power of mercy.

As in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, Strout deftly exposes the tensions that fester among families. But she also takes a broader view, probing cultural divides…Illustrating the power of roots, Strout assures us we can go home again—though we may not want to.

…No one should be surprised by the poignancy and emotional vigor of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel…the broad social and political range of The Burgess Boys shows just how impressively this extraordinary writer continues to develop.