Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Elizabeth Strout does it again, walking us through what the pandemic meant to those who could protect themselves early on. As always, the characters feel like someone I might actually know. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. A really fun bonus: Characters from other Strout novels make appearances big and small, including Bob Burgess from "The Burgess Boys" and Olive Kitteridge from the "Olive Kitteridge" and "Olive, Again." While you can totally appreciate "Lucy by the Sea" as a standalone book without having read any of the others before it (it is fourth in the "Lucy Barton" series), it's a much richer experience if you know what comes previously.

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

Strout captures the minutiae of recent years with insight and compassion iNews, 40 Best Books to Read This Autumn 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 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. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.Lucy By the Sea is another Barton installment that confronts the deep and familiar tangles of intimate relationships . . . Through this complex and isolating time, Lucy plumbs the nuances of human connection TIME 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 Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout — courage through stormy Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout — courage through stormy

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. 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. Lucy by the Sea holds a mirror up to everything we have been through recently. Not only reflecting disbelief, isolation and how different and at the same time similar we are to each other, but also what happens to human relationships when we can't be together. Superb Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled GroundGraceful, deceptively light... Lucy’s done the hard work of transformation. May we do the same.” — The New York Times Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ...