This month's selection:
OLIVE KITTERIDGE
by Elizabeth Strout
 Thirteen tales, one unforgettable
character...
Crosby seems to be a typical small town on the coast of Maine. Its inhabitants know each other well
and are linked to each other's triumphs and adversities. In all these stories,
Olive Kitteridge, now retired from being a schoolteacher, plays a leading or
subsidiary role, always with her strong and convincing mixture of psychological
insight and anger, compassion and deep resentments. Around her swirl such
characters as a lounge singer haunted by a past love, a a son tyrannized by
her overbearing sensitivities, a stoic husband bound to a marriage both broken
and unbroken at the same time. Elizabeth Strout, in her
lambent prose and amazing humanity, offers us one of modern literature's richest
characters and profound insights into the human condition.
"Impossible to forget"
-- Publisher's Weekly
(starred review)
"Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the
axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin
themselves into Elizabeth Strout's unforgettable novel in stories."
-- O:
The Oprah Magazine
"Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive
Kitteridge. . . . You'll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs
her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion.
. . .Glorious, powerful stuff."
-- USA Today
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