Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge; My Name Is Lucy Barton) revisits Crosby, Maine, and many of the beloved characters after whom Strout has titled previous books in Tell Me Everything, a quiet, captivating novel that finds beauty and meaning in the mundane. What happens here is nothing much and, also, as its title suggests, everything: Lucy Barton, the writer, and Bob Burgess, the lawyer, take long walks together and talk. Bob agrees to represent a strange, lonely man accused of killing his mother. Lucy visits Olive Kitteridge in her retirement community, where they tell each other stories. Bob visits his brother in New York. Lucy visits her apartment in New York. Bob's ex-wife visits Maine from New York. And so on and so forth, a web of characters living out their everyday lives, at once ordinary, boring and interconnected, yet full of vim and vigor: murder mysteries and affairs and love stories and heartbreak and death and loss and a pandemic and a crumbling world and friendships and more!
"Jesus Christ," Lucy says to Olive on one of her first visits. "All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them." What Strout does so expertly in Tell Me Everything is record them, combining details so small that they might otherwise be overlooked in ways that build a compelling story of humanity in its many forms. Clear-sighted and sharp-witted, Tell Me Everything explores what it means to live a life worth living, one built within and upon relationships of all shapes and sizes. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer