Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Revered for her deeply empathetic and perceptive approach, Strout creates existentially complex interior worlds for seemingly simple characters. Like so many of her protagonists, Artie Dam is a salt-of-the-earth husband, father, and teacher who leads a notably mundane life. When his 27-year-old son, Rob, reveals that Reginald, an old family friend, has sent him a deathbed confessional letter claiming that he, not Artie, is Rob’s biological father, Artie rightfully questions everything he has ever believed about the people he loves most. Not only has his wife, Evie, deceived him their entire marriage, long-valued friends and colleagues no longer appear as reliably supportive as they once were. Artie withdraws into himself, an understandable act of self-preservation in the face of betrayal and disappointment, and struggles to reconcile the fact that people hold “within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.” But Strout knows this universe. It’s the same one where Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge dwell, and she populates this new colony with equally complicated citizens. Tantalizingly perceptive and compassionate glimpses into the backstories of the key contributors to Artie’s crisis of the soul will give readers hope that these indelible individuals will one day appear in a trademark Strout spin-off of their own.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Strout fans will flock to her latest, thrilled to meet new characters in her always compelling fictional universe.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A diverting midlife story plucks at the secrets good people carry to the grave. As a reader, Artie Dam—the protagonist of Strout’s 11th book—encounters Olive Kitteridge, “a crotchety old woman from Maine” and Strout’s most celebrated fictional character. Artie picked up the Pulitzer-anointed book centered on Olive after his wife, Evie, loved it, “oh, years ago now.” Strout is having a bit of fun—that “oh” is a trademark—even though she marbles her latest novel with marital infidelity, political anxiety, and suicide. Indeed, it is the fact that Olive’s father died by suicide that Artie, 57 and gaining a paunch, recalls now in his own dismalness. As the story begins, he is pondering the most discreet way to die, despite having been Massachusetts’ Teacher of the Year five years earlier. Artie seems the inverse of irascible Olive: beloved by his students; by his grown son, Rob; and by the English teacher, Anne, who quietly pines for him. But like Olive, Artie has distressing impulses—he steals a comb, then some expensive shirts. Much of the text bobs along on Artie’s stocktaking memories, chunked out in short, occasionally abrupt paragraphs. Strout’s storytelling is thinning a bit, like middle-aged hair. Then, midbook, she clobbers Artie with a brutal existential shock. In its wake, Strout surfs the nature of loneliness, corrosive secrets, and the convulsions of the 2024 presidential election. Hers is an unremittingly Blue State book, although Artie has one friend who, unbeknownst to him, supported Donald Trump. On the day after the election, Artie somberly concludes that his “country was committing suicide.” This is the first novel in which Strout entirely vacates Maine for another setting. But she sticks with Artie and, on the final pages, delivers him a satisfying finale. Vivid characters are set adrift in a “ripped from the headlines” tableau that complicates the story, and the storytelling. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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A married high school teacher confronts his despair and isolation in this insightful outing from Strout (Tell Me Everything). Artie Dam, 57, has a beautiful home on the Massachusetts coast, a long and stable partnership with his wife, Evie, and a job he loves, but he can’t shake his “accretion of loneliness,” nor can he bring himself to reveal it to anyone. Recalling the suicide of a character in a novel he read, Artie is reminded that “people do die of loneliness” and decides to end his life. After he nearly drowns in a sailing accident, his brush with mortality renews his desire to live, but he’s rocked again when his 27-year-old son, Rob, confides in him that a DNA test showed he’s not Artie’s biological child. As father and son reimagine their bond, Artie must decide whether to jeopardize his marriage by telling Evie what he’s learned. Some of the episodes feel a bit random, but Strout masterfully explores her central themes (after a “lunatic” former president is reelected, a clear reference to Trump, Artie feels like the “country was committing suicide”) and offers timeless observations, suggesting, for example, that her characters feel distant from those they love most because “to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know.” This will stay with readers. (May)