Lucy by the Sea

BESTSELLING, PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR: Elizabeth Strout's novels have sold over 530,000 copies TCM, and her work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Women's Prize and won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction STROUT IS BELOVED BY THE PRESS: 'Miraculous' Guardian; 'Brilliant' Sunday Times; 'I cannot get Lucy Barton out of my head' The Times; 'Profound' Financial TimesSTAR-STUDDED FANBASE: Elizabeth Strout's many fans include Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Ann Patchett, Rachel Joyce, Emma Healey, David Nicholls, Maggie O'Farrell and Roddy DoyleStunningly universal . . . with brilliant acuity, Strout has seized on the parallels between Lucy Barton's pervasive sense of alienation and the way the recent global crisis has exposed the helplessness felt by ordinary people everywhere[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 itA superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her ownI cannot get Lucy Barton out of my headStrout's portrait of a divorced couple united by worry for their two grown daughters illuminates a refreshingly unexplored angle of Covid . . . They leap off the page along with their creator's salty wit and a phantom scent of hand sanitizerElizabeth Strout is one of my very favourite writersIt's no secret that Elizabeth Strout is a stunning writer, but I still find myself amazed at the depth she brings to the world of her stories centered on Lucy BartonLucy 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. SuperbAn unflinching depiction of the ways we are all alone . . . Strout's most distinctive skill - the ability to render every character, big or small, with precision - is on full display . . . Lucy finds love oin the novel, but Strout never looks away from the loneliness that is inherent in being human: "We all live with people - and places - and things that we have given great weight to. But we are all weightless in the end."[Strout] has that rare ability to immerse readers in the world of her characters . . . moments 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 timesStrout captures the minutiae of recent years with insight and compassionYou 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 SeaThere is an insistent generosity in Strout's books, and a restraint that obscures the complexity of their constructionLucy By the Sea is another Barton installment that confronts the deep and familiar tangles of intimate relationships . . . Through this complex and isolating time, Lucy plumbs the nuances of human connectionPoised and moving . . . It is only in the steady hands of Strout, whose prose has an uncanny, plainspoken elegance, that you will want to relive those early months of wiping down groceries and social isolation . . . This is a slim, beautifully controlled book that bursts with emotionAfter giving a beloved secondary character from her 2016 bestseller I Am Lucy Barton his own standalone with last year's Oh William!, Strout returns to the source, packing her recently widowed heroine off to Maine from Manhattan during lockdown - and exploring, in her clean inimitable prose, no less than love, loneliness, and what it means to be aliveHeartwarming 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 capaciousStrout writes in a conversational voice, evoking those early weeks and months of the pandemic with immediacy and candor. These halting rhythms resonate . . . Rendered in Strout's graceful, deceptively light proseLucy by the Sea might be my favourite Elizabeth Strout novel yet. Such grace, such empathy, such exquisite and sharp observation - and yet so very much itself too. No one else writes like Elizabeth Strout

From the Pulitzer prize-winning, Booker-shortlisted author of MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON and OH WILLIAM!

'It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us'

In March 2020 Lucy's ex-husband William pleads with her to leave New York and escape to a coastal house he has rented in Maine. Lucy reluctantly agrees, leaving the washing-up in the sink, expecting to be back in a week or two. Weeks turn into months, and it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the sea.

Rich with empathy and a searing clarity, Lucy by the Sea evokes the fragility and uncertainty of the recent past, as well as the possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this miraculous novel are the deep human connections that sustain us, even as the world seems to be falling apart.

'A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own' Hilary Mantel

'A terrific writer' Zadie Smith

'She gets better with each book' Maggie O'Farrell

'Lucy by the Sea might be my favourite Elizabeth Strout novel yet. Such grace, such empathy, such exquisite and sharp observation - and yet so very much itself too. No one else writes like Elizabeth Strout' Rachel Joyce