Anything Is Possible

From #1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout comes a brilliant latticework of fiction that recalls Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity. Written in tandem with My Name Is Lucy Barton and drawing on the small-town characters evoked there, these pages reverberate with the themes of love, loss, and hope that have drawn millions of readers to Strout's work. ""As I was writing My Name Is Lucy Barton,"" Strout says, ""it came to me that all the characters Lucy and her mother talked about had their own stories-of course!-and so the unfolding of their lives became tremendously important to me."" Here, among others, are the ""Pretty Nicely Girls,"" now adults: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband, the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. Tommy, the janitor at the local high school, has his faith tested in an encounter with an emotionally isolated man he has come to help; a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD discovers unexpected solace in the company of a lonely innkeeper; and Lucy Barton's sister, Vicky, struggling with feelings of abandonment and jealousy, nonetheless comes to Lucy's aid, ratifying the deepest bonds of family. With the stylistic brilliance and subtle power that distinguish the work of this great writer, Elizabeth Strout has created another transcendent work of fiction, with characters who will live in readers' imaginations long after the final page is turned. Praise for Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton ""There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to . . . simple joy.""-The New York Times Book Review ""Spectacular . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.""-The Washington Post ""My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds. . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one.""-Newsday ""A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.""-The Boston Globe ""Sensitive, deceptively simple . . . It is Lucy's gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother's shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful. . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton-like all of Strout's fiction-is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it.""-San Francisco Chronicle From the Hardcover edition.