All Of Elizabeth Strout's Books, In Order

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Elizabeth Strout is the author of not only Oprah’s 107th Book Club pick, Tell Me Everything, but her 82nd selection, Olive, Again, as well. Strout’s fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and been adapted into an award-winning show and an Oprah-produced film. However, the author is arguably most famous for her beloved characters, who appear and reappear in her novels, moving in and out of small towns in Maine and, occasionally, big-city New York. While each book stands on its own—you don’t have to read them in any kind of order—they all interconnect in a web of recurring characters and settings. Read on to see how Strout’s world developed and expanded over the course of her novels…and to decide which one you want to read next!

Amy and Isabelle

Strout’s first novel, published when she was 42 years old, tells the all-too-common story of a daughter growing apart from her mother in adolescence—and the thankfully less common story of the 16-year-old’s affair with her math teacher. Set in the fictional mill town of Shirley Falls, Maine—a locale Strout returns to in many of her later works—this bestselling debut caught the attention of prestigious literary award judges and of Oprah herself, who adapted the novel into a made-for-television movie in 2001.

Abide with Me

Set in West Annett, another fictional Maine town, just upriver from Shirley Falls, in the 1950s, Abide with Me follows a small-town reverend and father struggling to return to himself—and his faith—in the aftermath of his wife’s tragic death.

Olive Kitteridge

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Strout introduces us to the indomitable Olive Kitteridge and to the town of Crosby, Maine—a setting and central character Strout returns to in both of her later Oprah’s Book Club selections. Told in 13 interlocking stories, Olive Kitteridge captures the extraordinary, ordinary life of its titular character, a retired schoolteacher, as well as the characters whose lives radiate from hers over decades of love, loss, and reinvention. In 2014, HBO released a four-part miniseries based on the book, starring Frances McDormand, Rosemary DeWitt, and Bill Murray, that went on to win six Emmy Awards.

The Burgess Boys

The first sentence of Tell Me Everything informs us that “this is the story of Bob Burgess.” If you read the book, you know it’s about so much more, but it’s impossible to get to the last sentence without wanting to know how Bob became the big-hearted and quietly haunted man he is. Good thing Strout wrote a whole book about it! In The Burgess Boys, Bob and his brother Jim—who was also featured prominently in Oprah’s 107th Book Club Pick—are both lawyers living in New York. Jim, a famous corporate attorney, and Bob, who writes appellate briefs for Legal Aid, have escaped the small town of their childhood, but neither has escaped the legacy of what happened there: a tractor accident that killed their father, and that the town blamed Bob for as much as he blamed himself. But when their nephew is accused of a hate crime in their hometown, the brothers return to Shirley Falls to address his legal case—as well as their fractured relationship with each other, and their own unresolved trauma.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Strout’s first novel set outside of Maine (and her first book written in first person), My Name Is Lucy Barton introduces us to its eponymous character, who is not the dreamy, successful writer we meet in Tell Me Everything, but a woman fighting for her life (and against childhood demons) in a New York hospital. An appendectomy gone wrong brings Lucy’s estranged mother to her bedside where, in flashbacks and conversations, the two make sense of her childhood of poverty and abuse. Reflecting on this period of her life from decades beyond it, we see the way that intergenerational trauma, artistic impulse, and family secrets reshape themselves—and us—over the years.

Anything Is Possible

Like Olive Kitteridge, Anything Is Possible tells the interconnected stories of the residents in one fictional small town, except instead of Crosby, Maine, it’s Amgash, Illinois: the hometown of Lucy Barton. Along with introducing us to a new cast of incandescent characters, the book also reintroduces us to Lucy herself, now a successful writer returning to the fraught and familiar landscape of her childhood.

Olive, Again

Olive is back! In Oprah’s 82nd Book Club pick, Olive is definitely older, potentially wiser, and maybe, she thinks, “Oh, just a tiny—tiny—bit better as a person.” But don’t come into this book expecting Olive to meet you with a bear hug and a hand-knit tea cozy—she’s still the endearingly prickly character we know and love.

Oh William!

After the death of her second husband, Lucy Barton reconnects with her first: a philandering but paradoxically comforting man named William. Most of the book takes place in New York, but Strout does bring Lucy, for the first time, across the Maine border on a road trip to visit William’s mother’s hometown. Though the couple (or are they exes?) stay many hours north of Crosby, they are getting tantalizingly close to Kitteridge territory.…

Lucy by the Sea

Lucy has finally arrived in Crosby, Maine—and all it took was a deadly pandemic! Like many New Yorkers in 2020, Lucy and William flee the city in search of rural safety. They find it—to an extent—in a seaside house rented from an old friend, Bob Burgess (yep, that Bob Burgess). While Strout’s two central characters don’t know most of their neighbors, her loyal readers certainly do—particularly the old woman by the name of Olive who, Lucy hears through the grapevine, is running her mouth at the local retirement home. But these dispatches from the outside world are just that; like many pandemic stories, this one is intensely insular. With a novel virus raging outside the house and old feelings resurfacing within it, the divorced couple attempts to chart an uncertain future.

Tell Me Everything

Oprah’s 107th Book Club pick is the story we Strout superfans have all been waiting for: one that brings all of her most beloved characters together at the same time, in the same place, for one spectacular story. As Oprah describes it, “Tell Me Everything has all the things: romance and mystery and secrets and even a possible murder experienced through the unrecorded lives of just ordinary folks.”

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