Book of the Month February 2025
Quizlit’s Book of the Month February 2025 is Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout. Tell Me Everything is the best of the Amgash series to date, about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.
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Book of the Month February 2025
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Tell Me Everything is a hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world. It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William.
Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. Together, they spend afternoons in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”
“Strout reminds us that storytelling can be powerful; that most people’s lives go unrecorded; and that paying witness to everyday events is a gift. With tenderness, honesty, intimacy, and compassion, Strout uses her cunning powers of observation to draw readers beyond the mundane to the miraculous complexities where true friendship lies. . . . An absolute must-have.”—Booklist, starred review
“The narrative threads make for dishy small-town drama, but even more satisfying are the insights Strout weaves into the dialogue. Late in the novel, after Olive asks Lucy the point of writing stories, she responds, ‘People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.’ Longtime fans and newcomers alike will relish this.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“No novelist working today has [Elizabeth] Strout’s extraordinary capacity for radical empathy, for seeing the essence of people beyond reductive categories, for uniting us without sentimentality.”—The Boston Globe
“Strout’s understanding of the human condition is capacious.”—NPR
“One proof of Elizabeth Strout’s greatness is the sleight of hand with which she injects sneaky subterranean power into seemingly transparent prose. Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight.”—The New York Times Book Review
Best Elizabeth Strout Books To Read
Olive Kitteridge
Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate, and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as Olive grows older, she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies.
A penetrating, vibrant exploration of the human soul, the story of Olive Kitteridge will make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain, and shed a tear or two.
Amy and Isabelle
Isabelle Goodrow has been living in self-imposed exile with her daughter Amy for 15 years. Shamed by her past and her affair with Amy’s father she has submerged herself in the routine of her dead-end job and her unrequited love for her boss. But when Amy, frustrated by her quiet and unemotional mother, embarks on an illicit affair with her maths teacher, the disgrace intensifies the shame Isabelle feels about her own past. Throughout one long, sweltering summer as the events of the small town ebb and flow around them, Amy and Isabelle exist in silent conflict until a final act leads ultimately to the understanding they both crave.
Lucy By The Sea
Lucy is uprooted from her life in New York City and reluctantly goes into lockdown with her ex-husband William in a house on the coast of Maine. Strout’s new novel is a miraculous work of fiction. A brilliantly sharp evocation of the period we have just lived through, it is a novel that both resonates deeply and consoles us too.
Olive Again!
Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply loveable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she comes to terms with the changes – sometimes welcome, sometimes not – in her own existence and in those around her.
Olive adjusts to her new life with her second husband, challenges her estranged son and his family to accept him, experiences loss and loneliness, witnesses the triumphs and heartbreaks of her friends and neighbours in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine – and, finally, opens herself to new lessons about life.
If you enjoyed Book of the Month February 2025, check out 5 Wonderful New Books for February 2025
