The haves and have-nots of Covid, Black Lives Matter, the storming of the Capitol – “there was deep, deep unrest in the country” – we watch it all unfold through Lucy’s disconcerted eyes. For a writer who excels at enclosed, benumbed spaces (think of the hospital room in the first Lucy novel), as well as all the quirks and uncertainties of intimacy, the whole concept is a gift.Īnd, all right, most people did not have an empty beach house in which to hide during the pandemic, but Strout knows that: this is an acutely socially aware novel with a wide political sweep. As William drives her off to Maine, we are immediately returned to the drama of those early dark unvaccinated days when frightened people, happily or not, were confined at close quarters for an unknown quantity of time. Of course, a large part of the fascination lies in the fact that this isn’t just Lucy’s recent past but our own too. Indeed it’s a truly monumental piece of work – one that you can’t help feeling deserves a less mischievously banal title (can you imagine a male writer calling a book Lucy By the Sea?).

Strout isn’t the first writer to go there, but she certainly makes magnificent and thrilling use of it in this, her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet. The disarming situation described at the opening of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel might seem fantastical, the stuff of a million post-apocalyptic movies, were it not for the fact that every single one of us has recently lived through it.

Elizabeth strout lucy barton