Excerpt from Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The pandemic had been hard for Olive Kitteridge—hard for everyone, really—but Olive had endured it, day after day in her little apartment in this retirement community, yet when they stopped allowing people to eat in the dining room and started bringing their food to them instead, she thought she would go absolutely batty. By the end of that first year, though, with her vaccinations and then later a booster, she was able to get out a bit more, someone might drive her into town or take her down by the water. But the real problem was that during the pandemic, Olive's best friend, Isabelle Goodrow, who lived two doors down from her, had taken a bad fall and—of all the awful things that could have happened—had been moved "over the bridge" to the nursing home part of the place. Now Olive went to visit Isabelle every day, reading her the newspaper from front to back. But it had been hard, and it still was.

Out on the end of the point of Crosby, high up on a cliff that looked over the (mostly) roiling waters of the Atlantic Ocean, lived a woman named Lucy Barton, who had arrived with her ex-husband, William, two years before, escaping New York City during the pandemic, and they had ended up staying in town. There were mixed feelings about this: The natural reticence toward New Yorkers was part of it, but also housing prices in Crosby had gone through the roof exactly because of folks like this Lucy Barton, who had decided to stay in town, and anyone from Maine who had been hoping to move into a nicer house now found that they could not afford one. Lucy Barton had grown up in a small town in Illinois and had lived in New York City her whole adult life; she had never even been a summer person in Maine before arriving here with her ex-husband. Also, Lucy Barton was a fiction writer, and that made people have different feelings; mostly they would have preferred her to go back to New York, but nobody seemed to have anything bad to say about her; and except for her walks along the river with her friend Bob Burgess she was rarely seen. Although she was sometimes observed going through the back door that led up to the little office space she rented above the bookstore.

On Main Street there were HELP WANTED signs or HIRING NOW signs in most of the store windows, and along the coastline a few restaurants had to close because there were not enough people to work in them. What had gone wrong? There were different theories, but it would be fair to say that most inhabitants of Crosby did not know. They only knew that the world was not what it had once been. And most of these people in the town of Crosby were old, or almost old, because this is the way the population of Maine had been for years. Some said that this was the problem, that there were no young folks to take these jobs. Others argued that the unemployment situation was happening not just in Maine but all across the country; some speculated that it was the opioid crisis, that people weren't able to pass their drug test in order to work. And then others claimed that the younger generation was at fault; Malcolm Moody's sixteen-year-old grandson, for example, had come to visit for three days and was playing videogames on his iPhone constantly. What could you do?

Nothing.

And then in October the foliage exploded, shattering the world with a goldenness. The sun shone down, and yellow leaves fluttered everywhere; it was a thing of beauty. The days were cold and at night it rained, but in the morning there was the sun again, and all the glory of the natural world twinkled and nestled itself around the town of Crosby. The clouds that were low in the sky would suddenly block out the sun, and then just as quickly the clouds would part and it was as though a bright light had been turned on and the sky was blue and bright again with the yellow and orange leaves floating quietly to the ground.

* * *

A thought had taken hold of Olive Kitteridge on one of these days in October, and she pondered it for almost a week before she called Bob Burgess. "I have a story to tell that writer Lucy Barton. I wish you would have her come visit me."

Excerpted from Tell Me Everything: Oprah's Book Club by Elizabeth Strout. Copyright © 2024 by Elizabeth Strout. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.