New Zealand Listener

On life’s journey

OH WILLIAM! by Elizabeth Strout (Viking, $35)

Brace yourself when venturing into the world of American writer Elizabeth Strout. Her novels and short stories are quiet, told with economy, but unflinching and emotionally supercharged. Sometimes they are almost too much to bear.

Strout marked her card with , a novel published in 1998: the dissection of

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