Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout, Rosa Perez Perez · 2008

In the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine, Olive Kitteridge—a retired schoolteacher with a sharp tongue and a fiercely observant eye—navigates the quiet complexities of ordinary life. Through thirteen interwoven narratives, Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel reveals the hidden depths of a community where desire, despair, jealousy, hope, and love simmer beneath the surface. At times stern, at times patient, at times perceptive, at times in sad denial, Olive deplores the changes in her town and the wider world, yet often fails to see the transformations in those closest to her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance, a former student who has lost the will to live, her own adult child who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities, and her devoted husband Henry, whose loyalty to their marriage is both a blessing and a curse. With luminous prose and unflinching compassion, Strout crafts a portrait of a woman as unforgettable as the lives she touches—a story that reminds us that even in a place that seems like nowhere, the human heart holds the whole world.