Elizabeth Strout

Events: Breakfast with the Authors (Tickets $20)

Book: Olive Kitteridge

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Elizabeth Strout is the author of the national bestsellers Abide with Me and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines including The New Yorker.

In her latest work, Elizabeth Strout binds together thirteen rich, luminous narratives into a book with the heft of a novel, through the presence of one larger than life character: Olive Kitteridge.

At time stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher deplores the changes in her little town and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; and her husband Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life. Sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty, Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition.

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly described Olive Kitteridge as “a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection ... The collection is easy to read and impossible to forget.”