Tell Me Everything
✨ Oprah’s Book Club Pick ✨
A hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.
Excerpt:
A thought had taken hold of Olive Kitteridge on one of these days in October, and she pondered it for almost a week before she called Bob Burgess. “I have a story to tell that writer Lucy Barton. I wish you would have her come visit me.”
The story was one that Olive had been reflecting on with more and more frequency, and she thought—as people often do—that if her story could be told to a writer, maybe it could be used in a book one day.
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With her “extraordinary capacity for radical empathy” (The Boston Globe), remarkable insight into the human condition, and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst; fall in love and yet choose to be apart; and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it: What does anyone’s life mean?
It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which we our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”
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“Strout reminds us that storytelling can be powerful; that most people’s lives go unrecorded; and that paying witness to everyday events is a gift. With tenderness, honesty, intimacy, and compassion, Strout uses her cunning powers of observation to draw readers beyond the mundane to the miraculous complexities where true friendship lies...An absolute must-have.”
“Strout’s tenderness for her characters and her belief that love is the only force in human lives as powerful as our essential loneliness are as moving as ever… Strout’s many fans will love this sweet, rambling tale.”
“The narrative threads make for dishy small-town drama, but even more satisfying are the insights Strout weaves into the dialogue. Late in the novel, after Olive asks Lucy the point of writing stories, she responds, ‘People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.’ Longtime fans and newcomers alike will relish this.”
“The Strout hive is strong, and no doubt it will be pleased with her latest novel, her fourth in five years, again set in Crosby Maine, home to Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton (the two of whom actually meet in this book), Bob Burgess, and all the rest. This is being billed as ‘a hopeful, healing novel,’ which may be exactly what we need this fall.”