Elizabeth Strout’s moving story shows how a simple hospital visit illuminates the tender relationship between an estranged mother and daughter.
Bestselling author Elizabeth Strout returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any time.
Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again/off-again friend and confidante.
Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.
Elizabeth Strout
About the Author
Before writing, Elizabeth Strout had a brief career in the law. She didn’t tell people about her ambition to become an author ‘Because they look at you with such looks of pity. I just couldn’t stand that.’No-one writes interior life as Strout does. This is meticulous observed writing, full of probing psychological insight. Lucy Barton is one of literature’s immortal characters – brittle, damaged, unravelling, vulnerable and most of all, ordinary, like us all.
— The 2022 judges on Oh William!
The Booker Prize Bookshop: Supporting Independent Booksellers
Other nominated books by Elizabeth Strout
