My Name Is Lucy Barton

An exquisite story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive KitteridgeLucy is recovering from an operation in a New York hospital when she wakes to find her estranged mother sitting by her bed. They have not seen one another in years. As they talk Lucy finds herself recalling her troubled rural childhood and how it was she eventually arrived in the big city, got married and had children. But this unexpected visit leaves her doubting the life she's made: wondering what is lost and what has yet to be found.

My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters... It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one ― Newsday

In a brilliant year for fiction, I've admired the nuanced restraint of Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton -- Hilary Mantel ― Guardian Books of the Year

Elizabeth Strout's prose is like words doing jazz -- Rachel Joyce

So good I got goosebumps... a masterly novel of family ties by one of America's finest writers ― Sunday Times

Plain and beautiful...Strout writes with an extraordinary tenderness and restraint -- Kate Summerscale

Hypnotic...yielding a glut of profoundly human truths to do with flight, memory and longing ― Mail on Sunday

I loved My Name is Lucy Barton: she gets better with each book -- Maggie O'Farrell ― Guardian Books of the Year

This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Read it ― Sunday Telegraph

This is a book you'll want to return to again and again and again ― Irish Independent