Elizabeth Strout had just finished writing her Booker-shortlisted novel Oh William!, revisiting her much loved character Lucy Barton, when the pandemic struck. Now, barely a year later, we have Lucy by the Sea, another in the series, which follows Lucy and her former husband William as they flee New York for a damp house in New England, to sit out the pandemic. “Lucy and William were just so much in my head. I thought: OK, let’s have him take her up to the coast of Maine, and stick them on this cliff and see what happens,” Strout says from her house in Brunswick, Maine, which she and her husband have made their permanent home since lockdown. The two novels “work together”, she says. “I see them as a continuation of each other.”
Since My Name Is Lucy Barton in 2016, which introduced us to Lucy and her estranged mother, and the extreme poverty of her childhood, Strout has written another four books – quite a sprint for a writer who published her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, when she was 43, waiting another eight years before a follow-up, Abide With Me. While both were critically acclaimed, it was with her third novel, Olive Kitteridge, about a retired school teacher in Maine, that her career really took off. Her prickly, no-nonsense heroine with a fondness for proclaiming “Hell’s bells!” became an unlikely hit and byword for a kind of New England melancholy orneriness. The novel won a Pulitzer prize in 2009 and resulted in a devoted readership, helped along by an Emmy-winning HBO series starring Frances McDormand. Olive’s many fans will be delighted to know she pops up in this new novel (she’s now in a retirement home) inspiring another shoe-stealing stunt.
