“Strout excels at distilling complex human emotions — fear of failure, regret that we never measured up — into something familiar and understandable.… Lucy By The Sea holds its own as an engaging and relatable story, where human bonds of love and meaning — over-examined and frayed as they may become in crisis — still serve as the essence of what makes us feel we matter and belong.”
Anne Eliot Feldman, “Long-Divorced Lucy Barton Finds Love During Pandemic,” BookTrib, September 19th, 2022.“In Lucy by the Sea, [Strout] continues to conceal her art in seeming artlessness and gives us a world in which nothing stands to reason or allows for easy expression. ”
Pico Iyer, “A Journal of the Plague Year,” Air Mail, September 17, 2022.“In its emotional heft and honesty, its ability to go fearlessly to the darkest places, its pellucid empathy and its spot-on rendering of the pandemic experience for both individuals and the country, [Lucy by the Sea] is perhaps the best of the four marvelous novels Strout has written featuring Lucy Barton.”
Pricilla Gilman, “Getting to the heart of the matter: Elizabeth Strout returns with the pandemic novel we need now,” Boston Globe, September 15, 2022.
“[A] whole suppressed world of the spirit seems to be speaking in and through Strout’s characters, a spirit urging the slaves of conventional reality to awaken to their need of liberation. For all the depths of anger and despair they uncover, and the bitterness they attest to, Strout’s works insist on the superabundance of life, the unrealized bliss always immanent in it.”
Pankaj Mishra, “Writing the Other America,” The New York Review, November 4, 2021.
“Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight. ”
Jennifer Egan, “Elizabeth Strout Gets Meta in Her New Novel About Marriage,” New York Times, October 18, 2021.
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