Tell Me Everything, from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout, is a hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.
In This Spotlight On Tell Me Everything
About Tell Me Everything
With her “extraordinary capacity for radical empathy” (The Boston Globe), remarkable insight into the human condition, and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”
It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been.
Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Pub. date: 09/10/2024
ISBN-13: 9780593446096
Praise for Tell Me Everything
“Strout reminds us that storytelling can be powerful; that most people’s lives go unrecorded; and that paying witness to everyday events is a gift. With tenderness, honesty, intimacy, and compassion, Strout uses her cunning powers of observation to draw readers beyond the mundane to the miraculous complexities where true friendship lies. . . . An absolute must-have.”—Booklist, starred review
“The narrative threads make for dishy small-town drama, but even more satisfying are the insights Strout weaves into the dialogue. Late in the novel, after Olive asks Lucy the point of writing stories, she responds, ‘People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.’ Longtime fans and newcomers alike will relish this.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Praise for Elizabeth Strout
“No novelist working today has [Elizabeth] Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.”—The Boston Globe
“Strout’s understanding of the human condition is capacious.”—NPR
“One proof of Elizabeth Strout’s greatness is the sleight of hand with which she injects sneaky subterranean power into seemingly transparent prose. Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight.”—The New York Times Book Review
“There is an insistent generosity in Strout’s books, and a restraint that obscures the complexity of their construction.”—The Washington Post
About Elizabeth Strout, Author of Tell Me Everything
Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine.
You can connect with Elizabeth Strout on her website, on Facebook, and X.
Titles by Elizabeth Strout
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