Almost five years after winning a Pulitzer for the linked stories of Olive Kittredge, Elizabeth Strout returns to her native Maine in The Burgess Boys, a novel about a family scarred by their father's death under the wheels of the family car--accidentally set in motion by one of his children playing with the gear shift. The oldest Burgess son, Jim, flees the small town of Shirley Falls for a fashionable Brooklyn brownstone and a white-shoe Manhattan law firm, while his younger brother, Bob, lives in a small nearby apartment and grinds out briefs in a Legal Aid office. Only Bob's twin sister, Susan, remains in Maine to raise her son, Zachary, a reclusive teen whose father ran off to discover his heritage in Sweden.
One day Zach inexplicably throws a frozen pig's head into the storefront mosque serving Shirley Falls's growing community of Somali refugees. When outraged church leaders and social workers join federal hate crime prosecutors and raise the profile of the case, a panicked Susan calls Jim, and he returns (with Bob) for an uncomfortable family reunion.
Strout moves her story easily among the complicated lives of the Burgess children. The town's displaced Somali community, with its own broken families and internal politics, provides an apt metaphor for the domestic drama in the Burgess family. Strout has already exhibited a sharp eye for the details of small-town Maine; in The Burgess Boys, she shows an equally deft touch in dissecting the fixations of Brooklyn's gentrifying classes--yet she doesn't judge their foodie obsessions or sexual dalliances. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.