Tell Me Everything: A Novel

by Elizabeth Strout Narrated by Kimberly Farr

Overview

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her “extraordinary capacity for radical empathy” (The Boston Globe), remarkable insight into the human condition, and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters-Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more-as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone's life mean?”

It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known-“unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them-reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which we our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Elizabeth Strout

“No novelist working today has [Elizabeth] Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.”—The Boston Globe

“Strout’s understanding of the human condition is capacious.”—NPR

“One proof of Elizabeth Strout’s greatness is the sleight of hand with which she injects sneaky subterranean power into seemingly transparent prose. Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight.”—The New York Times Book Review

“There is an insistent generosity in Strout’s books, and a restraint that obscures the complexity of their construction.”—The Washington Post

“Strout’s prose propels the story forward with moments of startlingly poetic clarity.”—The New Yorker

“The darkness of Strout’s vision is leavened by her belief in moments of grace, which may arrive in a slant of light, a sudden insight, or (best of all) a connection to another human being.”—Chicago Tribune

“With extraordinary economy of prose—few writers can pack so much emotion, so much detail into a single paragraph—Strout immerses us in the lives of her characters, each so authentically drawn as to be deserving of an entire novel themselves.”—The Guardian

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160459660
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/10/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged