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Oh William!
A General Fiction Novel by Elizabeth Strout
Book 3 of the Amgash Series
Subgenres:
- Marriage Fiction,
- Family Secrets,
- Literary Fiction
This book is for you if you're into...
- Divorced couples navigating old bonds and new secrets
- Introspective stories about family mysteries reshaping relationships
- Narratives driven by a sharp, reflective narrator
From Little Stack
Years after their divorce and subsequent marriages, Lucy Barton’s first husband, William, asks her to help him after a family secret is revealed. As she accompanies William to find the sister he never knew, Lucy reflects on their marriage, both the pleasure and pain she experienced and how their relationship is evolving. Above all, her reflections make us wonder how well we know anybody, even a spouse we’ve lived with for years.
If you’re new to Elizabeth Strout’s lovely prose and books set among an interconnected set of characters, this book about Lucy’s first marriage is a good one to dip your toes into.
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they've come from—and what they've left behind.
BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are.
So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout's "perfect attunement to the human condition."
There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we've grown apart. At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. "This is the way of life," Lucy says: "the many things we do not know until it is too late."
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