Elizabeth Strout’s new novel — a Christmas gift of the first order – is her most enigmatic. Reviewers have drawn wildly different conclusions about the book’s message. For me, the book explores what happens when you don’t know who you can trust. Lucy, the protagonist, finds that she can’t even trust herself during the first year of the pandemic because there are so many unknowns. She tries to trust William, her ex-husband, who says he wants to save her from living in New York City, where refrigerated trucks of corpses lined the streets. Should she? For how long? And at what cost?
Strout, Elizabeth. Lucy by the Sea. Random House, 2022, p. 287.