by Elizabeth Strout
4.8 · 4 reviewsThe unforgettable Olive Kitteridge returns — older, no softer, and still discovering how little she understood about the people she loves.
Years after we first met her, Olive Kitteridge is back in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine — widowed, prickly, and as incapable of small talk as ever. In a series of interlocking stories, Elizabeth Strout follows Olive into the later chapters of a long life, where a tentative new companionship, a difficult son, and the quiet indignities of growing old force her to reckon with the woman she has been.
Around Olive turns a whole community of neighbors, former students, and near-strangers, each carrying private grief and longing. A new mother adrift in postpartum loneliness, an old man confronting a son's secret, a former poet returning home — their lives brush against Olive's and against one another, and the small mercies they exchange feel enormous.
What emerges is a portrait of ordinary people trying, often badly, to be honest about love and loss. Strout writes with such plainness and precision that the smallest gesture lands like a confession, and Olive — blunt, exasperating, achingly human — becomes a mirror for anyone who has ever realized, too late, what mattered most.
First published in 2019.
4 reviews
I read this slowly on purpose because I didn't want it to end. It is a book about regret and the strange grace of late-life love, and it never once feels sentimental. My mother and I have been passing our copy back and forth for weeks.
When the chapters center on Olive, the book is flawless. A few of the side stories about townspeople I never quite connected with, and I found myself impatient to get back to her. Still, the writing is so quietly devastating that I'd recommend it to anyone.
Each linked story stands on its own but they accumulate into something enormous. I kept underlining sentences that said in ten words what most novels can't say in a hundred. By the end I felt like I'd lived a whole life alongside her.
I didn't think a sequel could match the first book, but this one quietly broke my heart in a dozen places. Olive is infuriating and tender in the same breath, and the chapter at the doctor's office left me sitting with my coffee going cold. Strout sees old age with such unflinching kindness.