Lucy by the Sea: A Novel

From Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a former couple in lockdown together—and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.

With her trademark spare, crystalline prose—a voice infused with “intimate, fragile, desperate humanness” (The Washington Post)—Elizabeth Strout once again turns her exquisitely-tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, this time following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton and Oh William! through the early days of the pandemic.
 
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and longtime friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. They will not emerge unscathed.
 
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear, struggles, and isolation that come with life in a global pandemic, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart—the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love. “We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to,” Lucy says. “But we are weightless, in the end.”