Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Everything; Lucy by the Sea; Oh William!, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London.

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist unveils a fresh setting and troupe of characters that lifts her literary game with energized prose and gimlet-eyed insights."--TIME

"Strout's masterful novel poses searching questions, yet ultimately gives readers hope."--Shelf Awareness

"Strout masterfully explores her central themes (after a 'lunatic' former president is reelected, a clear reference to Trump, Artie feels like the 'country was committing suicide') and offers timeless observations, suggesting, for example, that her characters feel distant from those they love most because 'to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know.'"--Publishers Weekly

"'I wonder why people never say anything real, ' Artie Dam says to his wife after a party. The longtime, very beloved high school teacher is unaccountably lonely, a feeling that's exacerbated when a secret about his family comes to light. It throws his world upside down and gobsmacks him with the realization of how little we know about other people (or ourselves, for that matter). 'Mostly we travel through life unsighted, ' he notes in this beautiful tale from Strout (Olive Kitteridge), my all-time favorite author, whose books are often at least partly about how authentic human connections are made by sharing our stories."--AARP

"We're all familiar with the concept of being alone in a crowd. But leave it to Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout to find new dimensions to the feeling in this powerful new novel. Strout's story follows high school teacher Artie Dam, who seems to have made a pleasant life for himself--a time-tested marriage, a large group of friends, a sailboat for goodness sake--until a revelation upends it all and makes him consider just how powerful his connections have really been."--Town & Country

"I always know I'm in steady hands when reading Elizabeth Strout, whether it's a Lucy Barton book, or one from another of her multiverse . . . Strout is consistent and satisfying: her writing is . . . always delightful, and illuminates the world in new, brighter colors with every book she writes."--Literary Hub

"Strout's decision to start fresh feels like a promise: new characters to obsess over, new quiet devastations to survive. Here, a high school teacher's seemingly settled life is upended by a long-kept secret. Strout will always make ordinary lives feel urgent. New territory just raises the stakes."--Oprah Daily

"Revered for her deeply empathetic and perceptive approach, Strout creates existentially complex interior worlds for seemingly simple characters . . . Tantalizingly perceptive and compassionate glimpses into the backstories of the key contributors to Artie's crisis of the soul will give readers hope that these indelible individuals will one day appear in a trademark Strout spin-off of their own."--Booklist, starred review

Publisher: Random House

Pub date: 2026-05-05

Length: 224 pages