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'Lucy By The Sea' succeeds at capturing disruptions, anxieties of pandemic

Elizabeth Strout's latest is a chronicle of a plague year — and also of the main character's growing insights into herself, her family, and their changing relationships during this period.
Source: Random House

Oh Lucy! What were you thinking, fleeing the comfortable Manhattan apartment you shared with your late, doting second husband to ride out the pandemic with your philandering ex in a remote seaside cabin in Maine?

In Lucy By the Sea, Elizabeth Strout's fourth novel since 2016 about writer Lucy Barton, we find the hyper-sensitive and supremely sympathetic heroine at sea, awash in confusion as her world — and the world — changes drastically, seemingly overnight.

When we last checked in on Lucy in (which was just for this year's Booker Prize),

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