My name is Lucy Barton por Blanca Ajuriagoxeaskoa

MY NAME IS LUCY BURTON  BY ELIZABETH STROUT

I didn’t know   anything about this American writer until last Christmas holidays.  I read a review in a newspaper about her last novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, which included some sentences taken from the book that took my attention, and I decided to buy and read it.  I enjoyed it very much.

That’s why I want to recommend it to you.   I discovered a great storytelling in Elizabeth Strout’s last novel, a story in which human relationships are narrated. It is a very deeply affecting novel, one which is read easily but also makes you stop, reread a sentence or a paragraph, and think about what you have just read.

Elizabeth Strout (born January 6, 1956) is an American novelist, academic and short story writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her family and friends on the coast of Maine.

She has written many award winning novels: Amy and Isabelle (1998), Abide with me (2006), Olive Kitteridge (2008), The Burgess Boys (2013) and most recently, My Name is Lucy Barton (2016).

Here you have a summary of the novel taken from The Guardian.

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“The novel takes places over five nights in the mid-1980s. Lucy Barton has been in hospital for three weeks with an undiagnosed illness after having her appendix removed. She is separated from her husband and two daughters, aged five and six, whom she misses desperately. Unexpectedly, her mother, from whom she has been estranged for years, arrives at her bedside. Lucy is now a successful writer, but her mother’s presence reignites memories of her childhood – of poverty, abuse and social exclusion: “We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois.”

If you want to know more about the book, click here.