Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Literary Agency. This masterly novel’s message, made clear in the moving denouement, is that sometimes in order to express love, one has to forgive. Her narrative voice is restrained yet expressive. Life in New York City, specifically the scourge of AIDS (the setting is the 1980s) and the underlying troubles of her marriage.

Running counter to the memories of her harsh, stoic upbringing At one point in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a successful writer living in Manhattan, recalls the time she was introduced at her wedding reception by her elegant mother-in-law, Catherine.Speaking to one of the guests, Catherine said, This is Lucy. Though her mother calls her Wizzle, an endearing childhood name that implies warmth and closeness, she is unable to tell Lucy that she loves her. From Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout, comes Lucy by the Sea, a novel featuring Lucy Barton, the indomitable heroine of My Name is Lucy Barton and Oh William Lucy is uprooted from her life in New York City and reluctantly goes into lockdown with her ex-husband William in a house on the coast of Maine. Strout develops the story in short chapters in which the reader intuits the emotional complexity of Lucy’s life as she reveals long-buried memories of an isolated, profoundly impoverished childhood and the sexual secrets, “the knowledge of darkness,” that shrouded her life. Convalescing from a postsurgery infection, Lucy is tentative about making conversation, gently inquiring about people back home while avoiding the real reason why there’s been no contact with her parents. Lucy Barton is shocked when her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for years, flies from tiny Amgash, Ill., to be at Lucy’s hospital bedside in New York. Despite its slim length, Strout’s ( The Burgess Boys) tender and moving novel should be read slowly, to savor the depths beneath what at first seems a simple story of a mother-daughter reconciliation.

Lucy barton by elizabeth strout