Elizabeth Strout, Lucy By the Sea (2022)

[jserraglio]

Started it today. Can’t stop reading. It is A Journal of the Plague Year 300 years after Defoe and Camus’ The Plague, rolled into one. And much more.

Lucy, a widowed novelist and her thrice married parasitologist ex-husband William leave NYC for rural Maine during the pandemic. The first-person narrative is so involving, the writing so sharply pointed it goes right to the heart. In many ways, too, it’s an elegy to the City as it existed before the events of 2020 altered it forever.