Olive Kitteridge

The New Yorker: The whitecaps in the harbor, some familiar piano chords, the doughnut a man brings to his wife after visiting his lover?Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force. These linked stories introduce the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine, where the pull of domestic tragedy is stronger for rarely being spoken of. Angela doesn?t mention the bruises she?s noticed on her mother?s arm at the nursing home; Marlene learns of her husband?s infidelity only after his funeral; Kevin plans to shoot himself, like his mother before him. And there in every story, like a tree that?s been blackened by lightning but still leafs in the spring, stands Olive Kitteridge, a retired math teacher who loves her tulips, bullies her husband, and barks at anyone foolish enough to irritate her. You loathe this woman at the book?s beginning; you long for her at its finish. Strout makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.