Elizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty. Last year she published Oh William!, which is on the Booker shortlist. In it, her much-loved narrator Lucy Barton returns tentatively to the company of her first husband, William, thinking all the while about empathy, loneliness and her sense of invisibility. Now Lucy By the Sea picks up the story, but there is a virus spreading and we are at the dawn of a changed world.
“I don’t know how to say it,” Lucy hesitates, thinking back to
