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Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout is an American author who has written numerous bestselling and critically acclaimed novels. Her third book Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and was later adapted as a television miniseries for HBO. Oh William!, which features the beloved recurring character Lucy Barton (first seen in My Name is Lucy Barton), was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Books by Elizabeth Strout
“Elizabeth Strout’s prose is so calmly, naively beguiling. The apparently simplicity of her language, the informality of the address to the reader takes you immediately into a dialogue with a character. What we admired enormously was the complexity with which the reader comes to see how little Lucy understands herself. The process of watching somebody in late middle age, rethinking their understanding of who they have been, who they are, and what they might be.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
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.
From our article Books like Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Interviews where books by Elizabeth Strout were recommended
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Neil MacGregor
The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best original novel written in the English language. We asked the art historian Neil MacGregor, chair of this year’s judging panel, to talk us through the six novels that made the 2022 shortlist—and why fiction can be a most effective means of engaging us emotionally in social and political crisis elsewhere.
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022