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.
