“New York City, in literature and life, tends to find a place for everyone—even those of us who arrive wearing the wrong clothes, missing the irony, at sea amid allusions to prep schools and psychotherapists and summer houses. Social class, that most discomfiting subject for Americans, is at the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s potent new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (Random House), which tells the story of a woman so strikingly different in temperament from Strout’s most famous creation to date—Olive Kitteridge, who made an HBO-Pulitzer juggernaut out of wit and irascibility—she seems to have almost been created in her relief.”