Author(s): Elizabeth Strout

Contemporary Fiction

A new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is cause for celebration. Her bestselling novels, including "Olive Kitteridge "and" The Burgess Boys, "have illuminated our most tender relationships. Now, in "My Name Is Lucy Barton, "this extraordinary writer shows how a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all the one between mother and daughter. Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable. Praise for Elizabeth Strout Strout has a magnificent gift for humanizing characters. " San Francisco Chronicle" What truly makes Strout exceptional . . . is the perfect balance she achieves between the tides of story and depths of feeling. " Chicago Tribune" [Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. " USA Today" Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force. " The New Yorker" [Strout s] themes are how incompletely we know one another, how desperately hard every person in the world [is] working to get what they need, and the redemptive power in little things a shared memory, a shock of tulips. "People""