My Name Is Lucy Barton
2299
My Name Is Lucy Barton
2299
A powerful, poignant novel about three half sisters in post-war Japan, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Snow Country With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two half sisters - born to the same father but different mothers - struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time, while Momoko, their father's first child - haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together - seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan's greatest writers.
I am deeply impressed. Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue. I have never read her before and I knew within a few sentences that here was an artist to value and respect -- Hilary Mantel
Strout's best novel yet -- Ann Patchett
An exquisite novel... in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to - 'I was so happy. Oh, I was happy' - simple joy -- Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review
So good I got goosebumps... a masterly novel of family ties by one of America's finest writers * Sunday Times *
My Name is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships... Deeply affecting novel...visceral and heartbreaking...If she hadn't already won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge this new novel would surely be a contender * Observer *
Hypnotic...yielding a glut of profoundly human truths to do with flight, memory and longing * Mail on Sunday *
This is a book you'll want to return to again and again and again * Irish Independent *
Slim and spectacular...My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It starts with the clean, solid structure and narrative distance of a fairy tale yet becomes more intimate and improvisational, coming close at times to the rawness of autofiction by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. Strout is playing with form here, with ways to get at a story, yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. She is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.... * Washington Post *
My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters... 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 *
Details
ISBN13: 9780241248782
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 208
Edition:
Publication Date: 11 Oct 2016
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.8(H)x12.9(L)x1.4(W)156
Weight (gm): 156
Author Biography
Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh William!, Amy and Isabelle, Abide With Me, The Burgess Boys, Olive Kitteridge, and Olive, Again. She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize. She lives in Maine.Reviews
A heart-wrenching story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge * Publisher's description *I am deeply impressed. Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue. I have never read her before and I knew within a few sentences that here was an artist to value and respect -- Hilary Mantel
Strout's best novel yet -- Ann Patchett
An exquisite novel... in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to - 'I was so happy. Oh, I was happy' - simple joy -- Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review
So good I got goosebumps... a masterly novel of family ties by one of America's finest writers * Sunday Times *
My Name is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships... Deeply affecting novel...visceral and heartbreaking...If she hadn't already won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge this new novel would surely be a contender * Observer *
Hypnotic...yielding a glut of profoundly human truths to do with flight, memory and longing * Mail on Sunday *
This is a book you'll want to return to again and again and again * Irish Independent *
Slim and spectacular...My Name Is Lucy Barton is smart and cagey in every way. It starts with the clean, solid structure and narrative distance of a fairy tale yet becomes more intimate and improvisational, coming close at times to the rawness of autofiction by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk. Strout is playing with form here, with ways to get at a story, yet nothing is tentative or haphazard. She is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.... * Washington Post *
My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters... 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 *