I also appreciate that the Lucy books are on the shorter side and Strout inserts lots of breaks and pauses throughout.

I saw an older, more wiser, but maybe a more vulnerable Lucy, but still Lucy, and one of my favorite characters. These circular winds, like orbs of incense smoke, pull us further, deeper, into the mosaic of familial novels.

I’ve made no secret that Elizabeth Strout is one of my favorite authors, but this was a complete miss. And it's a persistent fascination, something Larkin described, in Poetry of Departures, as 'this audacious, purifying, elemental move,' the mere prospect of which left him 'flushed and stirred'. The book is set in a fictionalized Rosslare, the seaside village where we went every summer as children. Yet their lives connect on multiple levels, and their encounter leads to a renegotiation of both characters’ pasts. PM Plus Storybooks feature a classic story structure with tension, climax and resolution to engage young readers.

My enjoyment of Lucy as a narrator aside, It was still hard to read this book at times because so much of it is TRULY tied to COVID, and other than Lucy's reflections on the past, the pandemic talk and circumstance takes up much of the narrative, so if it's 'too soon' for you to dive in, I would recommend instead jumping into this story in a few years (I hope! Latif Mahmud also travels to Europe, but by a more legitimate route—obtaining a student visa to East Germany and travelling by a circuitous route from there to the UK. This is Elizabeth Strout’s ninth book (all of which take place in the same fictional world) after: her 1998 debut “Amy and Isabelle”; her second novel “Abide With Me” (2006); her first interlinked short-story collection about the eponymous “Oliver Kitteridge” (2008) which won the Pulitzer Prize she later followed up with “Olive, Again” (2019); “The Burgess Boys” (2013); her Booker longlisted “My Name is Lucy Barton” (2016) which introduced perhaps her most popular and successful character (a successful but insecure novelist from an extremely hard and poor upbringing) which was then followed up in the “Amgash” series by the interlinked short stories “Anything Is Poss The past is always present in Lucy’s memories of her mother, father and siblings as is her desire in the present over her relationship with her daughters- not wanting it to be like her relationship with her mother.

The books have been written using carefully selected vocabulary to ensure children experience reading success. Each character could become a character in her own tale, a contemporary Arabian Nights story rendered post-exotic by its political relevance in modern times. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart — the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.

I am a refugee," he tells the reader, "an asylum-seeker; these are not simple words, even if habit of hearing them makes them seem so. I picked up the book, and Lucy talks about taking a shower with water up to her ankles, and she talks about a baking soda and vinegar solution to fix it. We also see relationships change and develop between all the characters, some relationships are created and even lost. An excellent piece of writing and a quick read (I read it over three days - mind you I do have a long commute to work! Gurnah’s latest (after Paradise) follows an East African immigrant living in a small English town as he and his family reckon with his past, which has long been shrouded in mystery.It is a familiar minor climax in our stories, leaving what we know and arriving in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions. As the narrative progresses we get to know more about Lucy’s daughters and their respective lives- their childhood, professional and personal lives and their bond with their parents. While Lucy still grieves for her late second husband David, she finds herself comforted by William’s presence and remains concerned for the well-being of her daughters both of whom are experiencing rough patches in their relationships. Used to western reporters dashing in and out of the Strip in times of crisis, the people she met were touched by her genuine, unflinching interest and opened their hearts to her. I got to know the tides: I mean I got to understand when they went out and came back in, and they comforted me.