Lucy by the Sea
From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown — and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.
Excerpt:
Like many others, I did not see it coming.
But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.
William is my first husband; we were married for twenty years and we have been divorced for about that long as well. We are friendly, I would see him intermittently; we both were living in New York City, where we came when we first married. But because my (second) husband had died and his (third) wife had left him, I had seen him more this past year.
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With her trademark spare, crystalline prose — a voice infused with “intimate, fragile, desperate humanness” (The Washington Post) —Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic.
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. 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.
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“Strout follows up Oh William! with a captivating entry in the Lucy Barton series.… Loneliness, grief, longing, and loss pervade intertwined family stories as Lucy and William attempt to create new friendships in an initially hostile town. What emerges is a prime testament to the characters’ resilience. With Lucy Barton, Strout continues to draw from a deep well.”
“No novelist working today has Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality. I didn’t just love Lucy by the Sea; I needed it. May droves of readers come to feel enlarged, comforted, and genuinely uplifted by Lucy’s story.”
“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. ”
“Strout excels at distilling complex human emotions.… 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.”
“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.”
“Clarity of perception alternates with doubt in a way that readers may recognise as vividly as the routines of bumped elbows, amateur hairdressing and DIY home plumbing. Catching in the very rhythm of narration the pressures of 2020, letting us listen as Lucy tries to make sense of relationships in lockdown and political tensions deepening across the country, Strout has written another wondrously living book, as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for.”
“The through lines of our lives have veered beyond our control [during lockdown], yet some of us cling to the myth that we can find a path back to 2019. By the novel’s end Lucy has discerned otherwise, but lo! there’s a proverbial ray of hope. A lapsed connection kindles anew as she forges a fresh life for herself, rendered in Strout’s graceful, deceptively light prose. She joins the dance of family and friendship, adding a few subtle steps. Lucy’s done the hard work of transformation. May we do the same.”
“Although simple on the surface, Strout’s new novel manages, like her others, to encompass love and friendship, joy and anxiety, grief and grievances, loneliness and shame — and a troubling sense of growing unrest and division in America.…Strout’s understanding of the human condition is capacious.”
“My concern with this book was to get the pacing right, because time felt altered during the pandemic, and this is essential to catch, and also to have things happen, because a lot did not happen during this time. But it turned out there were all sorts of things to occupy Lucy and William…
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