The Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton author branches out with the tale of a Massachusetts teacher haunted by trauma<\/p>\n
The American author Elizabeth Strout famously persisted throughout years of rejection to publish her first novel when she was in her 40s, and the hard work has certainly paid off. She won a Pulitzer prize in 2009, and has been\u00a0nominated multiple times for the Booker and Women\u2019s prizes. The Things We Never Say is her 11th\u00a0book.<\/p>\n
Strout, who grew up in Maine and New Hampshire, writes mainly about small-town America and the mostly white, working-class people who inhabit it. She\u2019s\u00a0interested in the small details of ordinary lives: people\u2019s joys and disappointments, marriages and infidelities, and the lasting effects of trauma. The fictional world of a Strout novel often extends into subsequent companion works: Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, was followed by Olive, Again<\/a> in 2019; the characters first seen in her 2016 novel My Name\u00a0Is\u00a0Lucy Barton<\/a> reappeared in Oh William!<\/a> in 2021 and Lucy by the Sea\u00a0in\u00a02022. In 2024, Strout took this world\u2011building to\u00a0another level when Lucy, Olive and\u00a0other recurring\u00a0characters were brought together in Tell\u00a0Me\u00a0Everything<\/a>. She has charted her fictional worlds so extensively across interlinked novels and stories\u00a0that\u00a0readers often think of her characters as their\u00a0personal\u00a0friends.<\/p>\n
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