An exquisite new novel from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge.
A mother comes to visit her daughter in hospital after having not seen her in many years. Her unexpected visit forces Lucy to confront her past, uncovering long-buried memories of a profoundly impoverished childhood; and her present, as the façade of her new life in New York begins to crumble, awakening her to the reality of her faltering marriage and her unsteady journey towards becoming a writer.
From Lucy's hospital bed, we are drawn ever more deeply into the emotional complexity of family life, the inescapable power of the past, and the memories - however painful - that bind a family together. My Name Is Lucy Barton is a tender expression of the meaning of familial love from one of America's finest writers.
Caroline Baum's Review
This spare, taut novel continues to mine the rich vein of mother-child relationships that have characterised all of Strout's writing. It is not as vinegary as Olive Kitteridge, although there are moments of tartness or excruciating awkwardness that still cause an intake of breath. Strout is masterly at oblique dialogue where what is being said is a veil for a much more unsettling and unspeakable truths.
Industry Reviews
Strout's best novel yet -- Ann Patchett I am deeply impressed. Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue. I have never read her before and I knew within a few sentences that here was an artist to value and respect -- Hilary Mantel An exquisite novel... in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to - 'I was so happy. Oh, I was happy' - simple joy -- Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters... It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one Newsday Slim and spectacular...My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. It starts with the clean, solid structure and narrative distance of a fairy tale yet becomes more intimate and improvisational, coming close at times to the rawness of autofiction by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. Strout is playing with form here, with ways to get at a story, yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. She is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times...[The character, writer] Sarah tells Lucy and her other students to go to the page 'with a heart as open as the heart of God.' And this is precisely what Strout has done Washington Post A novel of shining integrity and humour -- Alice Munro on 'Amy and Isabelle' Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force -- The New Yorker on 'Olive Kitteridge' As perfect a novel as you could ever read -- Evening Standard on 'Olive Kitteridge' Elizabeth Strout restores my faith in the word, in the quality of fiction to shine light on even the dark and still make us feel refreshed and cleansed and glad. Strout is one of our true treasures. My God - she is fun to read. -- Richard Bausch on 'Olive Kitteridge' As ambitious as Philip Roth's American Pastoral but more intimate in tone. -- Time Magazine on 'The Burgess Boys' Strout's prose propels the story forward with moments of startlingly poetic clarity. -- The New Yorker on 'The Burgess Boys' One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place. -- The New York Times Book Review on 'Amy and Isabelle' Strout's greatly anticipated second novel ... is an answered prayer. -- Vanity Fair on 'Abide With Me' Elizabeth Strout writes beautifully about the compromises and small joys of what we might call mature people. Delicate, nuanced, insightful, and profoundly moving, Olive Kitteridge provides exactly the pleasures and the depths of feeling that I crave when I read fiction -- Ann Packer on 'Olive Kitteridge'
