Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Literary Agency. This masterly novel’s message, made clear in the moving denouement, is that sometimes in order to express love, one has to forgive. Her narrative voice is restrained yet expressive. Life in New York City, specifically the scourge of AIDS (the setting is the 1980s) and the underlying troubles of her marriage. Running counter to the memories of her harsh, stoic upbringing

Though her mother calls her Wizzle, an endearing childhood name that implies warmth and closeness, she is unable to tell Lucy that she loves her. When a mother visits her daughter in hospital after many years apart, her unexpected visit forces Lucy to face her buried past, upending the faade of. My Name is Lucy Barton is a heart-wrenching story of mothers, daughters, and the complexity of family life. Strout develops the story in short chapters in which the reader intuits the emotional complexity of Lucy’s life as she reveals long-buried memories of an isolated, profoundly impoverished childhood and the sexual secrets, “the knowledge of darkness,” that shrouded her life. A reading guide for Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton Books. Convalescing from a postsurgery infection, Lucy is tentative about making conversation, gently inquiring about people back home while avoiding the real reason why there’s been no contact with her parents. Lucy Barton is shocked when her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for years, flies from tiny Amgash, Ill., to be at Lucy’s hospital bedside in New York.

Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.Despite its slim length, Strout’s ( The Burgess Boys) tender and moving novel should be read slowly, to savor the depths beneath what at first seems a simple story of a mother-daughter reconciliation. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life.

Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.

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