Tell Me Everything

For her 10th novel, Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout has returned to familiar ground: characters from her earlier books, such as Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, feature again. But whereas Strout has written novels centred on each of these figures to great success, only in this novel are they finally brought together.

In Crosby, a fictional town in Maine, the lawyer Bob Burgess takes on the defence of an apparently guileless man whose mother, Gloria Beach, has been murdered; the son has become the main suspect. Gloria Beach had been nicknamed “Bitch Ball” by local people, but as always with Strout, there’s more to the dead woman’s story than is initially obvious. Burgess fears for the accused, an isolated man who doesn’t own a mobile phone and whose main occupation appears to be painting pregnant women in the nude.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Contemporary fiction’s favourite battle-axe, Olive Kitteridge, is back.

Olive’s first outing as the titular anti-heroine in Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 novel won the author the Pulitzer Prize. She was also played by Frances McDormand in a HBO mini-series of the same name.

Strout has said she never expected to write about Olive Kitteridge again but “she honestly just showed up. I could see her in her car, nosing it into the marina […] I just saw her so clearly that I thought, ‘OK, I guess I will have to write this down.’” In Olive, Again, Kitteridge is now in her early 80s but she is the same woman who, in the earlier novel, said to her only son of his new wife, “She’s so nice, Christopher, it makes me puke.”