In her depiction of Olive, Strout balances the two deep, contradictory intuitions we have about human character: on the one hand, that we are made and shaped by our circumstances on the other, that we are simply ourselves, and could not change if we wanted to. She is bolshie, compassionate and fiercely judgemental.

Olive is a retired maths teacher living in a small town in Maine. It’s her third novel in four years, and though its title winks at the possibility of readerly exasperation, these stories reconfirm their author as a superlative talent operating at the height of her powers. Olive, Again is Strout’s most overt reunion yet with a previous creation. Her last book, Anything is Possible, was an overt expansion of its predecessor, My Name Is Lucy Barton, returning to central characters and crucial scenes. Recently, Strout has become more open about revisiting characters as they age. In previous works the links were hard to spot: a walk-on character might turn out to be the granddaughter of an earlier protagonist a whisper of off-stage abuse in one novel became the narrative focus of another. For years, Strout has been building connections between her books. With Olive, Again, she has returned to her earlier protagonist. It was that rare kind of book that can reasonably be called a masterpiece, and it won its author the Pulitzer prize. With 2008’s Olive Kitteridge she moved from novels to a trickier form: the cycle of interconnected stories. Her second, Abide With Me, went one better.

Olive, Again, Elizabeth Strout, Viking, 2019, 304pp, £14.99 (hardback)Įlizabeth’s Strout’s bestselling debut, Amy and Isabelle, announced the arrival of a serious talent.

Book olive again