The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout review – readers will delight in these new characters
The Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton author branches out with the tale of a Massachusetts teacher haunted by trauma
The American author Elizabeth Strout famously persisted throughout years of rejection to publish her first novel when she was in her 40s, and the hard work has certainly paid off. She won a Pulitzer prize in 2009, and has been nominated multiple times for the Booker and Women’s prizes. The Things We Never Say is her 11th book.
Strout, who grew up in Maine and New Hampshire, writes mainly about small-town America and the mostly white, working-class people who inhabit it. She’s interested in the small details of ordinary lives: people’s joys and disappointments, marriages and infidelities, and the lasting effects of trauma. The fictional world of a Strout novel often extends into subsequent companion works: Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, was followed by Olive, Again in 2019; the characters first seen in her 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton reappeared in Oh William! in 2021 and Lucy by the Sea in 2022. In 2024, Strout took this world‑building to another level when Lucy, Olive and other recurring characters were brought together in Tell Me Everything. She has charted her fictional worlds so extensively across interlinked novels and stories that readers often think of her characters as their personal friends.
