A later surprise visit from the girls is so cheering that it seems to leave “an afterglow” – an observation that touches you to the core because isn’t that something that we all experienced? From a young age she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. After giving a beloved secondary character from her 2016 bestseller I Am Lucy Barton his own standalone with last year's Oh William! Elizabeth Strout does it again, walking us through what the pandemic meant to those who could protect themselves early on. A really fun bonus: Characters from other Strout novels make appearances big and small, including Bob Burgess from "The Burgess Boys" and Olive Kitteridge from the "Olive Kitteridge" and "Olive, Again.

Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022 Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022

It is meant to feel like life—random, surprising, occasionally lit with flashes of larger meaning—but it is art. In March 2020 Lucy's ex-husband William pleads with her to leave New York and escape to a coastal house he has rented in Maine. The disarming situation described at the opening of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel might seem fantastical, the stuff of a million post-apocalyptic movies, were it not for the fact that every single one of us has recently lived through it. Their friendship blossoms as they help each other, offering support, hard truths, and loving backup. It’s a test or a parable, a vignette with the quality of an old woodcut, inescapable in its simplicity.In an especially resonant recollection, Lucy relates a film she watched as a child, “a blue screen with many white ping-pong balls bouncing around on it. But because my (second) husband had died and his (third) wife had left him, I had seen him more this past year.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout - Penguin Books Australia Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout - Penguin Books Australia

Not the kind of deep, resonant fiction we expect from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge. From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown — and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart. Catching in the very rhythm of narration the pressures of 2020, letting us listen as Lucy tries to make sense of relationships in lockdown and political tensions deepening across the country, Strout has written another wondrously living book, as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for.Not only reflecting disbelief, isolation and how different and at the same time similar we are to each other, but also what happens to human relationships when we can't be together. Tiny scenes of social tension are enough to flood her with the knowledge that there is “deep, deep unrest in the country”. Within this broad story arc, Lucy’s narration rambles from topic to topic: her newfound closeness with William; his unfaithfulness when they were married; their two daughters’ marital and health issues; her growing friendship with Bob Burgess; the surprise reappearance of William’s half sister, Lois; and memories of Lucy’s impoverished childhood, troubled relations with her parents, and ongoing difficulties with her sister, Vicky. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart—the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.

Lucy by the Sea — Elizabeth Strout Lucy by the Sea — Elizabeth Strout

Collective grief for the pandemic’s toll brushes against more private tragedies: infidelity, miscarriage, impotence, widowhood. The two rent a house and set up platonic housekeeping, while also trying to rescue their two married daughters, who live in New York City. Lucy seems the perfect person to interrogate the crisis, her pervading sense of fragility and fear that harks back to her tough, impoverished past: “My whole childhood was a lockdown. shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, had a circuitous structure, this follow-up, arriving just a year later, has a classic narrative frame whereby a seismic event – in this instance, the pandemic – sets the story in motion and gives a natural tension to proceedings. And while each of us has our own unique story to tell about this unsettling time, somehow Lucy manages to speak for many of us about the isolation, fear, uncertainties, anxieties, disruption, and political unrest, as well as the newfound friendships, love, and personal growth that defined 2020 and 2021.For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.