My Name Is Lucy Barton

Among novelists there are, as Thomas Wolfe once said to F. Scott Fitzgerald, "putter-inners" and "taker-outers." Elizabeth Strout is definitely a "taker-outer," and much of the wonder and beauty of her new novel comes from the weight of things unsaid, as well as the things that, pushing against that great, silent weight, are said after all. Those who love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Lila—and Strout's Pulitzer winner, Olive Kitteridge—will likely marvel too at the way the simplest of sentiments can gather breathless, heartbreaking meaning in this story of a lonely city woman and the small-town childhood she can't quite leave behind.