Elizabeth Strout

If we find a book we particularly like, it’s tempting to look for others by the same author and that can often be a great disappointment. Not so, however, when it comes to American writer, Elizabeth Strout. I loved her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, and recommended it to book clubs all over the place. Then I managed to source a copy of Abide With Me that she had written in 2006. I wondered at the shaky start and thought that it wasn’t going to gel but it did, and by the end I was living and breathing with the hapless minister, Tyler Caskey, and his devastated daughter, Katherine. Next I searched out Amy & Isabelle, Strout’s first novel, written in 1998 and all I can say is, wow! I loved that book so much. It was meticulously written, the characters came alive off the pages and every detail, every event brought the reader along so that you felt you were there in the New England mill town of Shirley Falls.

Elizabeth Strout is a New England girl who found her voice when she went to live in New York. By 1994 she had published a number of short stories but had a feeling that something was holding her back. In order to get herself over this literary hump, she signed up for a stand-up comedy class.

"I thought: That's a real pressure cooker. You've got your audience right there and you're responsible for them directly," she says, explaining this strange and, to her, terrifying impulse. "What would come out of my mouth?"

And what flowed from her lips was a stream of jokes making fun of her New England roots when she performed at an East Side comedy club. She realised then that she needed to return to her home and write from the heart.

Amy & Isabel was the story that came to her and to me it reads like the perfect novel. Not bad for a first book!