My Name Is Lucy Barton

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016
Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for March 2017

This must be the way that most of us manoeuvre through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true… So much of life seems speculation.

My Name is Lucy Barton is a perfect crystallisation of quiet, subtly brilliant talent from one of America’s finest contemporary writers.

Lucy Barton has spent her life running away from her past; from an isolated, penurious upbringing in Illinois where she and her siblings often went hungry. Now Lucy has moved through a faltering marriage to a carefully constructed new life in New York as a writer, replacing rural, open skylines for the Chrysler Building looming large on a tightly enclosed horizon.

When Lucy finds herself recovering in hospital, she is visited unexpectedly by the mother she hasn’t seen for many years. As the two of them talk, a seam of memory is opened wide, forcing Lucy to confront the past she has struggled so hard to keep at bay. As old tensions rise to the surface Lucy tries to accept what her life really amounts to; the many roles she has played, the people she has loved, abandoned and betrayed.

At heart, this is a book about women’s lives, about mothers and daughters and the brittle love that somehow endures beyond distance, longing, pain and loss.

In Lucy Barton, Strout has created an everywoman for our time; tenderly perceptive, humanly frail and utterly unforgettable.