My Name Is Lucy Barton - Hardcover

Strout, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400067693 ISBN 13: 9781400067695

Publisher: Penguin Random House USA, 2016

Synopsis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the tender relationship between mother and daughter in this extraordinary novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post - The New York Times Book Review - NPR - BookPage - LibraryReads - Minneapolis Star Tribune - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton

"A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words."--The Boston Globe

"It is Lucy's gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother's shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one."--Newsday

"Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times."--Lily King, The Washington Post

"An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion."--People

"This slim, perceptive novel packs more sentiment and pain into its unsparingly honest and forthright prose than novels two and three times as long. Strout . . . has always awed us with her ability to put into words the mysterious and unfathomable ways in which people cherish each other."--Chicago Tribune

About this title

Review:

"A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words."--The Boston Globe

"Sensitive, deceptively simple . . . [Elizabeth] Strout captures the pull between the ruthlessness required to write without restraint and the necessity of accepting others' flaws. It is Lucy's gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother's shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful. . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton--like all of Strout's fiction--is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra."--Newsday

"Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way . . . A book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times."--The Washington Post

"An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion."--People

"This slim, perceptive novel packs more sentiment and pain into its unsparingly honest and forthright prose than novels two and three times as long. Strout . . . has always awed us with her ability to put into words the mysterious and unfathomable ways in which people cherish each other."--Chicago Tribune

"Lucy Barton is . . . potent with distilled emotion. Without a hint of self-pity, Strout captures the ache of loneliness we all feel sometimes."--Time

"There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to--'I was so happy. Oh, I was happy'--simple joy."--Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

"Deeply affecting."--The Guardian

"Strout allies herself less with recent autobiographical fictions than with Ernest Hemingway, whose style remains unmatched for its capacity to convey the effects of trauma without sentimentality. . . . Reading My Name Is Lucy Barton, I was frequently put in mind of Hemingway's famous injunction to write 'the truest sentence that you know.'"--The Wall Street Journal

"Impressionistic and haunting . . . With Lucy Barton, [Strout] reminds us of the power of our stories--and our ability to transcend our troubled narratives."--Miami Herald

"Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue."--Hilary Mantel

From the Back Cover:

'Masterly. Fierce, urgent, clear. So good it gave me goosebumps. One of the best writers in America' Sunday Times

Lucy is recovering from an operation in a New York hospital when she wakes to find her estranged mother sitting by her bed. They have not seen one another in years. As they talk Lucy finds herself recalling her troubled rural childhood and how it was she eventually arrived in the big city, got married and had children. But this unexpected visit leaves her doubting the life she's made: wondering what is lost and what has yet to be found.

'Deeply affecting, heartbreaking. A powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships, weaving family tapestries with compassion, wisdom and insight' Observer

'Hypnotic, yielding a glut of human truths to do with flight, memory and longing' Mail on Sunday

'Tender, elegiac, this is the story of a single life that also manages to tell the story of many' Independent
'Beautifully taut, so compelling' Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Random House USA
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1400067693
• ISBN 13: 9781400067695
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208