Amy & Isabelle

Description

From the Man Booker Prize longlisted author of My Name is Lucy Barton Isabelle Goodrow has been living in self-imposed exile with her daughter Amy for 15 years. Shamed by her past and her affair with Amy's father she has submerged herself in the routine of her dead-end job and her unrequited love for her boss. But when Amy, frustrated by her quiet and unemotional mother, embarks on an illicit affair with her maths teacher, the disgrace intensifies the shame Isabelle feels about her own past. Throughout one long, sweltering summer as the events of the small town ebb and flow around them Amy and Isabelle exist in silent conflict until a final act leads ultimately to the understanding they both crave.

Elizabeth Strout's tenure as a lawyer (six months) was slightly longer than her career as a stand-up comedian (one night). She has also worked as a bartender, waitress and piano player at bars across the USA. She now teaches literature in New York, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

'One of those rare, invigorating books that take an apparently familiar world and peer into it with ruthless intimacy, revealing a strange and startling place.' * The New York Times Book Review on Amy & Isabelle * 'A novel of shining integrity and humour' -- Alice Munro on Amy and Isabelle 'Strout's prose propels the story forward with moments of startlingly poetic clarity.' * The New Yorker on The Burgess Boys * 'As perfect a novel as you will ever read . . . So astonishingly good that I shall be reading it once a year for the foreseeable future and very probably for the rest of my life' * Evening Standard on Olive Kitteridge * 'Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force' * The New Yorker on Olive Kitteridge * 'Masterfully wrought' * Vanity Fair on Olive Kitteridge * 'Strout has a wonderful ability to turn a phrase...[these] pages hold what life puts in: experience, joy, grief, and the sometimes-painful journey to love' * Observer on Olive Kitteridge * 'I am deeply impressed. 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. I have never read her before and I knew within a few sentences that here was an artist to value and respect' -- Hillary Mantel on My Name is Lucy Barton 'Strout's best novel yet' -- Ann Pachett on My Name is Lucy Barton 'An exquisite novel... 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, New York Times Book Review on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'So good I got goosebumps... a masterly novel of family ties by one of America's finest writers' * Sunday Times on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'My Name is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships... Deeply affecting novel...visceral and heartbreaking...If she hadn't already won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge this new novel would surely be a contender' * Observer on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'Hypnotic...yielding a glut of profoundly human truths to do with flight, memory and longing' * Mail on Sunday on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'This is a book you'll want to return to again and again and again' * Irish Independent on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'Slim and spectacular...My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. It starts with the clean, solid structure and narrative distance of a fairy tale yet becomes more intimate and improvisational, coming close at times to the rawness of autofiction by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. Strout is playing with form here, with ways to get at a story, yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. She is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times....' * Washington Post on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters... 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 on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'Her concise writing is a masterclass in deceptive simplicity...Strout writes with an exacting rhythm, with each word and clause perfectly placed and weighted and each sentence as clear and bracing as grapefruit. It's a small masterpiece' * Daily Mail on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'This short, simple, quiet novel wriggles its way right into your heart and stays there' * Red on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'A beautifully taut novel' * Guardian on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'Agleam with extraordinary psychological insights...delicate, tender but ruthless reveries' * Sunday Express on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'An eerie, compelling novel, its deceptively simple language is a 'slight rush of words' which hold much more than they seem capable of containing...This novel is about the need to create a story we can live with when the real story cannot be told...' * Financial Times on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'Strout uses a different voice herself in this novel: a spare simple one, elegiac in tone that sometimes brings to mind Joan Didion's' * The Tablet on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'An exquisitely written story...a brutally honest, absorbing and emotive read' * Catholic Universe on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'This is a glorious novel, deft, tender and true. Read it' * Sunday Telegraph on My Name is Lucy Barton * 'Honest, intimate and ultimately unforgettable' * Stylist on My Name is Lucy Barton *