How wonderful to return to Maine and get reaquainted with Elizabeth Strout’s beloved characters, Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, with a few cameo appearances by others from earlier books. Lucy has now left New York and, since the pandemic, is back with first husband William, close friends with Bob and gets to know Olive as they tell each other stories from their lives. Several big life changes occur, but at the heart of the novel are snapshots of everyday life and experiences of the people in the community and those they care about, their relationships and their history, traumas and triumphs. As Bob and Lucy realise, everyone is broken to some extent, everyone is lonely, but what is most important in life is love, in all its forms. As always, Strout writes with compassion and empathy, her characters come alive from the page and she really makes you think about your own life. William once said that he married Lucy because she feels joy, despite her troubled childhood, and the joy of the everyday as well as sometimes the sorrow is what really shines out of this book. Anyone who hasn’t read the earlier books can still enjoy this one, but will be missing out on some of the layers that have been built up over several volumes, and should seek out the earlier ones immediately. I envy anyone who still has the pleasure of that discovery to come.

This latest by Elizabeth Strout does not disappoint! Bringing together the characters who we have net throughout her writing into a poignant and moving story of love, friendship, ageing, the ever shifting nature of long term relationships in a story about stories. The stories we tell about others, to others and to ourselves. Excellent!

A beautiful last chapter to Strout’s characters. Readers will definitely love the way she manages to intertwine the lives of her main characters.

A new book from Elizabeth Strout is always such a treat and a comfort. She writes so well about people’s flaws and mistakes and loneliness and connections.

This is Elizabeth Strout’s tenth book (all of which take place in the same fictional world) after:
Her 1998 debut “Amy and Isabelle”;
Her second novel “Abide With Me” (2006);
Her Pulitzer Prize winning interlinked short-story collection “Oliver Kitteridge” (2008) with stories centred around the eponymous curmudgeonly (retired) maths teacher, later followed up with “Olive, Again” (2019);
“The Burgess Boys” (2013);
Her Booker longlisted “My Name is Lucy Barton” (2016) which introduced the eponymous successful but insecure novelist from an extremely hard and poor upbringing which was then followed up in the “Amgash” series by the interlinked short stories “Anything Is Possible” (2017), her Booker shortlsted novel “Oh William” (2021) about Lucy’s first husband, and then her COVID novel “Lucy By The Sea”.

That later novel had as its heart William insisting Lucy flees New York in the early stages of the pandemic and move with him to Maine, where Lucy strikes up a close friendship with the retired Bob Burgess (from “The Burgess Boys) – but Katherine (from “Abide With Me”), Isabelle (from “Any and Isabelle) and Olive Kitteridge all make appearances, the latter two more of a cameo appearance as both are living in a care home where Charlene – who Lucy meets when both volunteer at a food bank and befriends across the increasing US political divide – cleans.

This novel is a very direct chronological and character follow up “Lucy By The Sea” but: with the wider Burgess family playing a major role; the friendship between Bob and Lucy being completely central to the novel; a murder investigation providing the plot scaffolding (Bob coming out of retirement to defend an eccentric man suspected of killing the elderly mother he has nursed much of his life) and most delightfully a burgeoning friendship between Strout’s two most legendary characters one which starts around sharing their stories of the often deeply sad and affecting unrecorded lives (“Lucy Barton had used that phrase when she first met Olive and heard Olive ’s story about her mother: unrecorded lives, she had said. And Olive thought about this. Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded, and this struck her now. She summoned Lucy Barton again.”) they encountered over their long lives – but which ultimately and movingly causes them both to re-examine some of their closest relationships (Lucy with Bob, Olive with Isabelle) and to ultimately agree in a moving conclusion that “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love”

It is a must read for any fans of either Olive Kitteridge or Lucy Barton – and I know some fall into one camp or the other and simply essential for those who like both (I smiled when Charlene reflects that she “liked being with Lucy … Almost as much as she liked being with Olive Kitteridge”). For those who are unfamiliar with Strout’s work I would consider this book as a target rather than a beginning and read (as a minimum) “Olive Again” (for me the best of the Olive collections) and then back to back “My Name is Lucy Barton”, “Oh William” and “Lucy By The Sea” before this book.

Like so much of Strout’s writing, this is a beautiful, wise and often deeply affecting examination of human lives, of how childhood incidents can cause insecurities and shape character and behaviour for the rest of life, of ageing and how it can give a different perspective of parenting and parents, of the impossibility of really knowing another person and here in particular of what love means.