My Name Is Lucy Barton

Reviews

“A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe

“Sensitive, deceptively simple . . . [Elizabeth] Strout captures the pull between the ruthlessness required to write without restraint and the necessity of accepting others’ flaws. It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful. . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton—like all of Strout’s fiction—is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra.”—Newsday

“Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way . . . A book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—The Washington Post

“An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People

“This slim, perceptive novel packs more sentiment and pain into its unsparingly honest and forthright prose than novels two and three times as long. Strout . . . has always awed us with her ability to put into words the mysterious and unfathomable ways in which people cherish each other.”—Chicago Tribune

“Lucy Barton is . . . potent with distilled emotion. Without a hint of self-pity, Strout captures the ache of loneliness we all feel sometimes.”—Time

“There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to—‘I was so happy. Oh, I was happy’—simple joy.”—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

“Deeply affecting.”—The Guardian

“Strout allies herself less with recent autobiographical fictions than with Ernest Hemingway, whose style remains unmatched for its capacity to convey the effects of trauma without sentimentality. . . . Reading My Name Is Lucy Barton, I was frequently put in mind of Hemingway’s famous injunction to write ‘the truest sentence that you know.’”—The Wall Street Journal

“Impressionistic and haunting . . .  With Lucy Barton, [Strout] reminds us of the power of our stories—and our ability to transcend our troubled narratives.”—Miami Herald
 
“Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue.”—Hilary Mantel Expand reviews