Where to start with: Elizabeth Strout

The Guardian

11-07-2025

American author Elizabeth Strout has captured millions of readers' imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with rich inner lives. Her novels – often set in Maine, where she grew up – have won her a Pulitzer and got her shortlisted for the Booker and, this year, the Women's prize for fiction. Joe Stone gives us a tour of her interconnected oeuvre.
Strout's first novel, Amy and Isabelle, introduces many of the themes which characterise her work. It's 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've existed has recently been shattered. Amy has been seduced by her high-school maths teacher, which threatens to dismantle Isabelle's dearly held propriety and the decades-old secret it conceals. At once intricate and expansive, the novel introduced Strout's rare gift for uncovering the profound in the quotidian.
While her first two novels were critically lauded, it was Olive Kitteridge – which won the Pulitzer prize and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand – that established Strout as a singular talent. A novel told in 13 short stories, it centres on Olive, one of fiction's 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).
The resulting missed human connections have heartbreaking, funny and thrilling consequences – 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'll believe she's losing her mind (somehow, we cheer her on). At one point, studying an old photo of her husband, Olive thinks 'You will marry a beast, and love her.' Is she a beast? She certainly can be. But we love her.
All of Strout's 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.
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's 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 – they don't discuss Lucy's father's brutalities or her mother's 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.
Strout's 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. Still, there are inciting incidents: affairs, suicides and the occasional armed robbery. Tell Me Everything incorporates a murder mystery – attorney Bob Burgess (who first appeared in Strout's fourth book, The Burgess Boys, and who we are told has a big heart 'but did not know that about himself') is called to defend a reclusive man accused of murdering his mother.
It also features a will-they-won't-they romance between Bob and Lucy Barton. This intertextual element is another joy of Strout's 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's previous novels coalesce – most excitingly when Lucy is summoned for an audience with Olive Kitteridge (Olive's initial verdict? 'Meek-and-mousy'). After this shaky start, the pair continue meeting to discuss the 'unrecorded lives' of people they have known, and grapple with one of the central questions of Strout's work: what does anyone's life mean?
It's perhaps strange to describe Anything Is Possible as cheerful; one review billed it as 'a requiem for small town pain'. This 2017 novel, told in interlinked stories, is a companion to 2016's 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.
Elsewhere, the Nicely sisters are still metabolising the shame of their mother's 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's perhaps Strout's most macabre story.
Meanwhile, Linda's sister, nicknamed 'Fatty Patty' 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. 'Love was the skin that protected you from the world,' she decides.
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout is out now in paperback (Viking). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.