#amgash

With thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Lucy by the Sea is the fourth book in Elizabeth Strout’s series centring on Lucy Barton and her family, relationships and childhood in the impoverished town of Amgash, Illinois. This instalment finds Lucy in lockdown with her ex-husband William in a house in Maine.

I have read the other Lucy Barton books quite recently due to Oh William’s inclusion on the longlist for this year’s Booker Prize. They are all quite short and highly readable books. The character Lucy Barton has such a strong and unique narrative voice and, although we see into the lives of others in her orbit only in fragments, the plot of each novel is quietly compelling.

This book is part of what I think will one day be a genre called Pandemic Literature. This is an experience we have all lived through so recently, and there were many times in the book where I would say to myself: “Yes! I felt that too, exactly!”

Strout also touches on other issues that Americans were grappling with in 2020 and early 2021, such as the murder of George Floyd, the 2020 Presidential Election and the Capitol Riots. Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence tackles similar themes. Strout’s novel deals with these real world events with her typical subtlety and sensitivity.

Lucy Barton is a character who is open to people and to connections. Even as it becomes easier to connect to others online, it seems to have become more difficult to connect in a deeper, more human way. We tend to see the headlines of people’s lives and just end there. Lucy Barton is a character who is still willing to see the humanity in people.

A deeply human book.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a contemporary literary fiction novel, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher Penguin.

The novel is a sequel to her award-nominated My Name is Lucy Barton (a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award), and the 3rd novel in a sequence centred around the fictional rural town of Amgash, continuing to explore the heroine's complicated interpersonal relationships as a chance encounter leads her from New York back to Illinois, where the widowed author reconnects with her first husband and recalls the good and bad times that brought them together and drove them apart, via introspective character sketches.

Offered free in the UK and possibly other regions, available from the Kobo store.

“Anything is Possible,” is the last line of the last story in this remarkable collection. The collection is as much as it about miracles as it is about family secrets and hidden shame.

Anything is Possible

Abel of the short story “Gift,” feels shame that he and his sister Dottie used to eat out of dumpsters as children. Though he has worked hard and grown rich, Abel has never gotten over…