Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
🏆 Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, follows the life of an acerbic retired schoolteacher and her husband in a small coastal town in Maine. Olive is refreshingly not a people-pleaser. The novel has been made into an award-winning TV series starring Frances McDormand. The unsentimental journey of Olive Kitteridge continues in Olive Again which was published in 2019.
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Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-in-stories offers a detailed portrait of the title character: a somewhat difficult and abrasive former schoolteacher in smalltown Maine who keeps her emotions under wrap. But over the course of thirteen short stories, all set in the same community, we unpeel the layers of her and her neighbours’ lives until we find at the heart an engaging, multi-dimensional character who appears differently when viewed from any direction. Not a light-hearted read, this, but a rewarding and tightly-woven one that more than deserves your time.
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