If you like the minutiae of an Anne Tyler book then you would enjoy reading Elizabeth Strout.
There are now several stories about the characters Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton and in ‘Tell Me Everything’ they are together in the small town of Crosby in Maine.
Lucy and Olive meet every so often and tell each other stories, stories that are real and have happened to people whose lives go unrecorded, as most peoples do. Everybody has a back story, everybody is interesting but few of these lives are shared. In amongst this mutuality other stories are taking place: family tensions, both real and imagined, a love affair that never quite materialises, a job and respected position in the community that is threatened and indeed much more. It is a fallacy that life in a small town or village is necessarily ‘quiet.’ Everything happens, maybe just not so loudly or in your face as in city living.
There is also a film available called simply Olive Kitteridge and starring Frances McDormand who does an amazing job at portraying the increasing irascible Olive. Life and love and ageing. It is all there. Should you think that these books may be for you, then I would say that whilst ‘Tell Me Everything’ is a stand-alone novel, it would be immensely satisfying to read this sequence of stories from the beginning, i.e. with ‘Olive Kitteridge.’
Daunt Books comments that ‘Elizabeth Strout delicately unpicks lives lived quietly, in disarmingly beautiful prose.’ There is no more to say.