Ever since Elizabeth Strout’s first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1998), introduced us to the imaginary New England town of Shirley Falls, she has developed a grippingly cohesive fictional landscape that gets richer with every book. The lives of ordinary people in ordinary places are Strout’s speciality. Her debut featured an emotionally wounded single mother and her equally wounded daughter, while in Olive Kitteridge (2008) and Olive, Again (2019) we became acquainted with the cantankerous schoolteacher Olive and her longsuffering husband Henry in nearby Crosby. The Burgess Boys (2013) returned to Shirley Falls with the story of legal aid attorney Bob, his more successful corporate lawyer brother Jim, and their fraught relationship. My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), meanwhile, launched the parallel account, presented as a memoir, of the New-York based writer Lucy, a survivor, barely, of an impoverished and abusive post-second world war childhood in Illinois. The Barton family history was explored from different angles in a volume of linked stories, Anything Is Possible (2017), and in the Booker-shortlisted novel Oh William! (2021), where we learned more about Lucy’s failed first marriage to the microbiologist William Gerhardt.
These worlds finally converged in Lucy By the Sea (2022), a pandemic novel that brought Lucy’s memoir-writing up to date in real time. The outbreak of Covid saw Lucy and her ex-husband, William, renting a house together in Crosby in order to escape locked-down New York. In Tell Me Everything they are now permanently settled there and are on the point of remarrying. The central pillar in this configuration is Bob Burgess, who happens to be William’s solicitor and who was responsible for introducing him and Lucy to the community. We are told at the outset that this is Bob’s story – the story of an apparently unexceptional 65-year-old man, who “would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”
