Stunningly universal . . . with brilliant acuity, Strout has seized on the parallels between Lucy Barton’s pervasive sense of alienation and the way the recent global crisis has exposed the helplessness felt by ordinary people everywhere

[Strout’s] novels, intricately and painstakingly crafted, overlap and intertwine to create an instantly recognizable fictional landscape . . . you don’t so much read a Strout novel as inhabit it

A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own

I cannot get Lucy Barton out of my head

Strout’s portrait of a divorced couple united by worry for their two grown daughters illuminates a refreshingly unexplored angle of Covid . . . They leap off the page along with their creator’s salty wit and a phantom scent of hand sanitizer

Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favourite writers

It’s no secret that Elizabeth Strout is a stunning writer, but I still find myself amazed at the depth she brings to the world of her stories centered on Lucy Barton

Lucy by the Sea holds a mirror up to everything we have been through recently. Not only reflecting disbelief, isolation and how different and at the same time similar we are to each other, but also what happens to human relationships when we can’t be together. Superb

An unflinching depiction of the ways we are all alone . . . Strout’s most distinctive skill – the ability to render every character, big or small, with precision – is on full display . . . Lucy finds love oin the novel, but Strout never looks away from the loneliness that is inherent in being human: “We all live with people – and places – and things that we have given great weight to. But we are all weightless in the end.”

[Strout] has that rare ability to immerse readers in the world of her characters . . . moments of quiet revelation – infidelities, or glimpses into the indignities of incontinence and cancer – feel poignant and real, but also unsentimental. It is a compassionate, life-affirming read, and a much-needed balm for these trying times

Strout captures the minutiae of recent years with insight and compassion

You would be forgiven for avoiding any pandemic-set novels for the rest of the decade, but it’s worth making an exception for Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy By The Sea

There is an insistent generosity in Strout’s books, and a restraint that obscures the complexity of their construction

Lucy By the Sea is another Barton installment that confronts the deep and familiar tangles of intimate relationships . . . Through this complex and isolating time, Lucy plumbs the nuances of human connection

Poised and moving . . . It is only in the steady hands of Strout, whose prose has an uncanny, plainspoken elegance, that you will want to relive those early months of wiping down groceries and social isolation . . . This is a slim, beautifully controlled book that bursts with emotion

After giving a beloved secondary character from her 2016 bestseller I Am Lucy Barton his own standalone with last year’s Oh William!, Strout returns to the source, packing her recently widowed heroine off to Maine from Manhattan during lockdown – and exploring, in her clean inimitable prose, no less than love, loneliness, and what it means to be alive

Heartwarming as well as somber . . . Strout’s new novel manages, like her others, to encompass love and friendship, joy and anxiety, grief and grievances, loneliness and shame – and a troubling sense of growing unrest and division in America . . . Strout’s understanding of the human condition is capacious

Strout writes in a conversational voice, evoking those early weeks and months of the pandemic with immediacy and candor. These halting rhythms resonate . . . Rendered in Strout’s graceful, deceptively light prose