This is a lovely, heartfelt, deeply endearing story about the Covid lockdown as experienced by one of Elizabeth Strout's most beloved characters, Lucy Barton. William was a little off-putting but still I liked his character, I do like the way the author phrases. Lucy By The Sea holds its own as an engaging and relatable story, where human bonds of love and meaning — over-examined and frayed as they may become in crisis — still serve as the essence of what makes us feel we matter and belong.

Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022 Lucy by the Sea: A Novel Hardcover – September 20, 2022

In addition to dealing with grief for those close to them who die of Covid, Lucy wrestles with being the mother to grown-up daughters who don't particularly need her, as well as horrifying memories of her terrible, abusive childhood.There are incidents that Lucy cannot forget and which she lays before us, in a confession that asks no forgiveness.

LUCY BY THE SEA | Kirkus Reviews LUCY BY THE SEA | Kirkus Reviews

Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. Lucy by the Sea is the fourth in Strout’s Amgash series, novels where Lucy Barton features as narrator and protagonist (though the second book, Anything Is Possible, is a collection of loosely interlinked stories in which she takes a chorus role). And still more nonplussed when the friend who’s lending them the Maine house won’t come out to greet them because, as William explains, coming from New York, “in his mind we’re toxic”.But Strout’s ability to drench each page in equivocality, in a kind of awe – expertly honed now through four Lucy novels, including Oh William!

Lucy by the Sea - Penguin Books UK

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 . On the airy clifftop porch we are a long way from Lucy’s beginnings, but Strout is as concerned as ever with legacies of fear and inhibition, with “what we came from”, and what is passed on.

Strout’s idiomatic style, the plain but persuasive pattern of her prose, makes clear in ways that feel new the collective trauma of recent years.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout Summary and reviews of Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

Collective grief for the pandemic’s toll brushes against more private tragedies: infidelity, miscarriage, impotence, widowhood. After giving a beloved secondary character from her 2016 bestseller I Am Lucy Barton his own standalone with last year's Oh William!Written in Lucy's first-person voice, this ingenious novel reminds me of two friends conversing about the details of their day. No novelist working today has Strout's extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.