Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart—the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love. If, like me, you find you’re “over Covid”, to the extent that you’ve no interest in reading a fictional retelling, Lucy by the Sea will change your mind. As with the superb closing story in Hilma Wolitzer’s reissued collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, the strangeness of the pandemic is made fresh through the kind of considered detail and clarity of insight that is so often missing in the moment. Elizabeth Strout paints with a fine brush on a small canvas. Like the works of Alice Munro, Strout’s novels are portraits of unremarkable, profoundly human lives. Her interest is in the local and the particular. From her debut Amy and Isabelle (1998) to her Pulitzer Prize-winner Olive Kitteridge (2008), Strout depicts a world of interconnected individuals, most of whom reside in small-town Maine. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout Summary and reviews of Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother. Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart—the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.There is also repetition in theme, across a variety of characters: poverty, loss, loneliness, food issues, infidelity, and the vitality of nature, the value of connection, which is at the heart of Strout’s writing.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout — courage through stormy Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout — courage through stormy

If, like me, you find you’re “over Covid”, to the extent that you’ve no interest in reading a fictional retelling, this book will change your mind Strout's] novels, intricately and painstakingly crafted, overlap and intertwine to create an instantly recognizable fictional landscape . . . you don't so much read a Strout novel as inhabit it Guardian Graceful, deceptively light ... Lucy's done the hard work of transformation. May we do the same." — The New York Times Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over. It’s early March and Lucy Barton’s ex-husband, William – she’s still fond of him but they have lived apart for as long as they were married – calls to say he wants to get her out of New York. They’ll go to a friend’s empty beach house in Maine “just for a few weeks”, he assures her. He urges her to cancel all her appointments and bring her computer. “Everyone is going to be working from home soon,” he says, not least their two adult daughters – and he admits he’s “begged” them to leave the city as well.

There is an insistent generosity in Strout's books, and a restraint that obscures the complexity of their construction Washington Post No novelist working today has Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.I didn’t just love Lucy by the Sea; I needed it.May droves of readers come to feel enlarged, comforted, and genuinely uplifted by Lucy’s story.” — The Boston Globe Lucy by the Sea holds a mirror up to everything we have been through recently. Not only reflecting disbelief, isolation and how different and at the same time similar we are to each other, but also what happens to human relationships when we can't be together. Superb Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

Book Review: “Lucy by the Sea,” by Elizabeth Strout - The New

Discuss Lucy's relationship with her ex-husband, William. Why do you think they have remained in each other's lives for so long? Were you satisfied with how they ended up at the end of the novel, or were you wary, like their daughters? Please explain. Heartwarming as well as somber . . . Strout's new novel manages, like her others, to encompass love and friendship, joy and anxiety, grief and grievances, loneliness and shame - and a troubling sense of growing unrest and division in America . . . Strout's understanding of the human condition is capacious NPR Strout] has that rare ability to immerse readers in the world of her characters . . . m oments of quiet revelation - infidelities, or glimpses into the indignities of incontinence and cancer - feel poignant and real, but also unsentimental. It is a compassionate, life-affirming read, and a much-needed balm for these trying times Straits Times Lucy by the Sea has an anecdotal surface that belies a firm underlying structure. It is meant to feel like life—random, surprising, occasionally lit with flashes of larger meaning—but it is art.” — The New Yorker William is my first husband; we were married for twenty years and we have been divorced for about that long as well. We are friendly, I would see him intermittently; we both were living in New York City, where we came when we first married. But because my (second) husband had died and his (third) wife had left him, I had seen him more this past year.William takes command when he sees the pandemic coming. He rents a house on the coast of Maine and hurries Lucy out of her beloved New York. “Maybe just a few weeks,” he lies, firmly putting her computer in the car while she insists that for this brief spell she’ll only need an iPad. “What are those?” Lucy asks in disbelief, seeing his plastic gloves for use at the petrol pump. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeats, and this is how they go on. William continues uncommunicatively in his self-appointed task of saving Lucy’s life. Lucy goes where she is put, resisting engagement in a way that is hard to fathom until we understand how deeply it is connected with grief for her second husband, and separation from the city they shared. Written in Lucy's first-person voice, this ingenious novel reminds me of two friends conversing about the details of their day. It is filled with both joy and sorrow, and at times it is brutally raw with human emotion. Lucy by the Sea makes the pandemic personal. Collective grief for the pandemic’s toll brushes against more private tragedies: infidelity, miscarriage, impotence, widowhood. The novel is about the difficulty of feeling like a person during a global pandemic—indeed, the difficulty of feeling anything at all. A “dazed,” “fuzzy” Lucy looks away while William watches the evening news. Concerned that “my mind was not quite right,” she confesses: “I could not read. I could not concentrate.” While in earlier novels Lucy’s defining characteristic is her willingness to plumb her own depths, here Lucy loses faith in the value of self-knowledge through storytelling. “About my work I thought: I will never write another word again,” she says. As if crushed by the weight of a moment that promises to be historic, Lucy questions how—and whether—to relate the particular to the general. Elizabeth Strout does it again, walking us through what the pandemic meant to those who could protect themselves early on. As always, the characters feel like someone I might actually know.

Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022 Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022

Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.You would be forgiven for avoiding any pandemic-set novels for the rest of the decade, but it's worth making an exception for Elizabeth Strout's Lucy By The Sea Vogue, Best New Books for Autumn