Lucy by the Sea: From the Booker-shortlisted author of Oh William!

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I really liked and enjoyed reading Lucy By The Sea. Not at all complicated and was easy reading. Lucy was a bit manipulative but managed to get what she wanted. I personally think the author took Covid too far....I guess there would not be a story if she did otherwise. William was a little off-putting but still I liked his character, I do like the way the author phrases....to the point and short paragraphs. Now I will read O William and get a better handle on who William is. Discuss Lucy's relationship with her ex-husband, William. Why do you think they have remained in each other's lives for so long? Were you satisfied with how they ended up at the end of the novel, or were you wary, like their daughters? Please explain. During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers, ... There is an insistent generosity in Strout's books, and a restraint that obscures the complexity of their construction Washington Post

Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout: A novel that makes Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout: A novel that makes

Written in Lucy's first-person voice, this ingenious novel reminds me of two friends conversing about the details of their day. It is filled with both joy and sorrow, and at times it is brutally raw with human emotion. Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over. Graceful, deceptively light ... Lucy's done the hard work of transformation. May we do the same." — The New York Times No novelist working today has Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.I didn’t just love Lucy by the Sea; I needed it.May droves of readers come to feel enlarged, comforted, and genuinely uplifted by Lucy’s story.” — The Boston Globe ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Time, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, PopSugar, She ReadsYou may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Heartwarming as well as somber . . . Strout's new novel manages, like her others, to encompass love and friendship, joy and anxiety, grief and grievances, loneliness and shame - and a troubling sense of growing unrest and division in America . . . Strout's understanding of the human condition is capacious NPR Lucy by the Sea makes the pandemic personal. Collective grief for the pandemic’s toll brushes against more private tragedies: infidelity, miscarriage, impotence, widowhood. The novel is about the difficulty of feeling like a person during a global pandemic—indeed, the difficulty of feeling anything at all. A “dazed,” “fuzzy” Lucy looks away while William watches the evening news. Concerned that “my mind was not quite right,” she confesses: “I could not read. I could not concentrate.” While in earlier novels Lucy’s defining characteristic is her willingness to plumb her own depths, here Lucy loses faith in the value of self-knowledge through storytelling. “About my work I thought: I will never write another word again,” she says. As if crushed by the weight of a moment that promises to be historic, Lucy questions how—and whether—to relate the particular to the general. Poised and moving . . . It is only in the steady hands of Strout, whose prose has an uncanny, plainspoken elegance, that you will want to relive those early months of wiping down groceries and social isolation . . . This is a slim, beautifully controlled book that bursts with emotion Vogue

Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022 Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022

If, like me, you find you’re “over Covid”, to the extent that you’ve no interest in reading a fictional retelling, Lucy by the Sea will change your mind. As with the superb closing story in Hilma Wolitzer’s reissued collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, the strangeness of the pandemic is made fresh through the kind of considered detail and clarity of insight that is so often missing in the moment. Graceful, deceptively light... Lucy’s done the hard work of transformation. May we do the same.” — The New York Times William is my first husband; we were married for twenty years and we have been divorced for about that long as well. We are friendly, I would see him intermittently; we both were living in New York City, where we came when we first married. But because my (second) husband had died and his (third) wife had left him, I had seen him more this past year. Strout captures the minutiae of recent years with insight and compassion iNews, 40 Best Books to Read This Autumn

Discuss Lucy's relationship with her ex-husband, William. Why do you think they have remained in each other's lives for so long? Were you satisfied with how they ended up?

Lucy by the Sea - Harvard Review

An unflinching depiction of the ways we are all alone . . . Strout's most distinctive skill - the ability to render every character, big or small, with precision - is on full display . . . Lucy finds love oin the novel, but Strout never looks away from the loneliness that is inherent in being human: "We all live with people - and places - and things that we have given great weight to. But we are all weightless in the end." Sarah Collins, Prospect It’s early March and Lucy Barton’s ex-husband, William – she’s still fond of him but they have lived apart for as long as they were married – calls to say he wants to get her out of New York. They’ll go to a friend’s empty beach house in Maine “just for a few weeks”, he assures her. He urges her to cancel all her appointments and bring her computer. “Everyone is going to be working from home soon,” he says, not least their two adult daughters – and he admits he’s “begged” them to leave the city as well.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Most of all – because it’s no spoiler to say that this is a love story – he is simply incapable of being anything but generous to her, even if it’s a generosity that Lucy finds herself unable to accept without “a shiver of foreboding”. He admits: “Yours is the life I wanted to save,” when explaining why he took her out of New York. “We all live with people – and places – and things – that we have given great weight to,” Lucy thinks. “But we are all weightless, in the end.” Maybe so, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel that better explains why that, probably, is enough. Strout's] novels, intricately and painstakingly crafted, overlap and intertwine to create an instantly recognizable fictional landscape . . . you don't so much read a Strout novel as inhabit it Guardian Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love. Reflective. Melancholy. Hopeful. Insightful. How would you describe the tone of Lucy by the Sea, and why?

Lucy by the Sea — Elizabeth Strout Lucy by the Sea — Elizabeth Strout

I feel like I might have a better answer to this if this wasn't my first book about Lucy, but I do feel like the author gave me enough history to be able to understand the book I was reading. Lucy mourns her brother, and his life from such ... - pnelson384

Inspired by the true events surrounding the destruction of the town, Iola, in the 1960’s, this story tells of hardship, loss, courage and resilience. Story begins on a small peach ranch in Iola, Colorado. The Gunnison River is damned, the town is flooded, and a reservoir built. Prior to this, Victoria, 17, encounters young Wilson Moon, by chance and falls for him. She gets pregnant and tragedy strikes. She isolates herself in a small hut in the mountains, where she struggles in the wilderness. Alone, she has the baby and gives him up to a young woman who, by chance is stopped in the woods with a newborn baby of her own. Character development superb and the writer is truly gifted. Example- “my insides were tumbling like pebbles in a stream.” She is able to describe the beautiful, harsh landscape so that you feel that you are there. A must read!