Lucy by the Sea: From the Booker-shortlisted author of Oh William!

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To readers of Strout’s previous books, it’s all unduly familiar, indeed stale, an impression reinforced when the author takes a searing emotional turning point from The Burgess Boys (2013) and a painful refusal of connection in Oh William! Under it all runs Lucy’s own loveless childhood, locked down with abusive parents in Amgash, Illinois.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout — courage through stormy Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout — courage through stormy

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. No novelist working today has Strout's extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality. At the heart of this miraculous novel are the deep human connections that sustain us, even as the world seems to be falling apart. This novel resonates with wisdom, insights, and a deep, almost visceral, understanding of what it means to be fully human. On being separated from her two adult daughters in difficult times: “I was aware that I felt a slight sense of remove from both the girls, and I understood this was because their sadness affected me too much.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.

Book Review: “Lucy by the Sea,” by Elizabeth Strout - The New

Every day another state had more cases, but I still did not understand what was ahead,” says Lucy as New York explodes “with a ghastliness I seemed almost not able to take in”. Strout refuses the easy satisfactions of a tender tale, though she is deeply interested in what these people can give each other.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: From the Booker-shortlisted author of Oh Lucy by the Sea: From the Booker-shortlisted author of Oh

Lucy goes where she is put, resisting engagement in a way that is hard to fathom until we understand how deeply it is connected with grief for her second husband, and separation from the city they shared.

She has come, as we are reminded again and again (and perhaps just occasionally too often), from an emotionally and materially impoverished background, a “very very sad family”. From her debut Amy and Isabelle (1998) to her Pulitzer Prize-winner Olive Kitteridge (2008), Strout depicts a world of interconnected individuals, most of whom reside in small-town Maine.

LUCY BY THE SEA | Kirkus Reviews LUCY BY THE SEA | Kirkus Reviews

It will make you feel warm and good all over, knowing that even though we all felt so alone and lonely at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, we are not alone and lonely. William was a little off-putting but still I liked his character, I do like the way the author phrases. The book begins with Lucy’s scientist ex-husband, William, convincing her to leave New York as the pandemic takes hold of the city. As with the superb closing story in Hilma Wolitzer’s reissued collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, the strangeness of the pandemic is made fresh through the kind of considered detail and clarity of insight that is so often missing in the moment. She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.William is my first husband; we were married for twenty years and we have been divorced for about that long as well. Learn about Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton books in honour of her Booker prize longlist nomination for Oh William!