Like Amy and Isabelle, The Burgess Boys is set in Shirley Falls, a mill town that is home to brothers Jim and Bob Burgess. By signing up you agree to our terms of use The Burgess Boys (2013) Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox.

Once the scandal breaks in their small town of Shirley Falls, Maine, Isabelle internalizes the harsh judgments from the community, which pushes her to finally confront the shame she’s been carrying around about her own past-a secret that’s irreversibly shaped the lives of both mother and daughter. When shy Amy falls for the advances of her math teacher, her relationship with Isabelle is severely fractured. Their mother-daughter bond is fraught with tension from unexpressed resentments, but ultimately held together by a fierce love. The story centers 16-year-old Amy Goodrow and her mother, Isabelle. Strout’s debut novel is also the first of her novels that I ever picked up-and it was love at first paragraph. Start with the first three, then dive right into Olive, Again. All of them will leave you feeling deeply rewarded and also wanting more. If these are themes that speak to you-and if you get shivers from exceptionally well-crafted prose-then consider picking up these Elizabeth Strout titles. I loved this and the narrator Kimberly Farr's presentation of the dialogue and Olive's thoughts is masterly.This is, indeed, what I came away with, not only after reading Olive Kitteridge, but after reading each of her other works as well-seven in all, each multilayered its own way. 'Tell your father to take you out because I'm not!' says the wife to the dog. The tragic failures of relationships are explored with infinite subtlety - between Olive and her grown-up son and his hostile step children who stare sullenly the silent, alienated old couple who have divided their living space with tape. 'Yes, you do,' replies the visitor and the grandmother's world collapses. 'Oh I talk too much about them,' she gushes. A grandmother plagues her uninterested visitor with pictures of her grandchildren on her phone, rattling on at length about their cuteness. These are ordinary characters living ordinary lives but Strout makes them matter, and makes us feel the magnitude of their apparently insignificant disappointments and sadnesses. That sounds beyond depressing, but these inter-linked, powerfully charged stories in which characters come and go tug at the heartstrings with such poignancy, such insights - and humour - that we're drawn right in. 'Olive Again' takes Olive further: widowed, into a second marriage with Jack (overweight and not the man he was since his prostate surgery) into old age with all its alone-ness, frustrations and indignities - and a second widowhood. Eleven years ago Elizabeth Strout published 'Olive Kitteridge' set in ordinaryville, Crosby, in Maine, which finished with strident, all-seeing Olive at 70.

Olive again by elizabeth strout